Well government bureaucracies have some special constraints. The tax payer wants them to be as small and cheap as possible, but to perform like an organization of 10 times the size. The pandemic through interesting curve balls to the health system. In normal times, the system is expected to be extremely lean and focused on maximizing health benefit for dollar. Every cent spent on a bureaucrat is a cent not spent on someone’s heath. In not-normal times, it suddenly has to come up with rules for public safety—things like maximum no. of people in indoor venues; priority rules for access to quarantine etc. From the bureaucracy point of view the rules have to be simple enough to administer with the resource available. To Joe Public, they are an ass because they don’t take into account things like ventilation, size of venue, what people do (eg singing) etc etc. Commonly, you also get people expecting instant change of rules based in new information which, with sober consideration, would be incomplete, poorly tested and contradictory (public filtering out studies that don’t say what they want to hear). What people don’t think about is what resources would be required to administer flexible and truly sensible rules—and whether they would be prepared to pay for them. I pity the well-meaning souls in our system struggling to do the right things with competing demands from public safety and economic impact.
Well government bureaucracies have some special constraints. The tax payer wants them to be as small and cheap as possible, but to perform like an organization of 10 times the size. The pandemic through interesting curve balls to the health system. In normal times, the system is expected to be extremely lean and focused on maximizing health benefit for dollar. Every cent spent on a bureaucrat is a cent not spent on someone’s heath. In not-normal times, it suddenly has to come up with rules for public safety—things like maximum no. of people in indoor venues; priority rules for access to quarantine etc. From the bureaucracy point of view the rules have to be simple enough to administer with the resource available. To Joe Public, they are an ass because they don’t take into account things like ventilation, size of venue, what people do (eg singing) etc etc. Commonly, you also get people expecting instant change of rules based in new information which, with sober consideration, would be incomplete, poorly tested and contradictory (public filtering out studies that don’t say what they want to hear). What people don’t think about is what resources would be required to administer flexible and truly sensible rules—and whether they would be prepared to pay for them. I pity the well-meaning souls in our system struggling to do the right things with competing demands from public safety and economic impact.