Professor Abbey Adams-Prassell

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30 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2021 last heard Jan 2021

Professor Abbey Adams-Prassell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Deaths at Home, Supermarket Infections and the Cobra Effect · 27 Jan 2021 podcast

So there's growing evidence that most people don't completely follow the self-isolation rules at the moment.

So, for example, a government-backed study from September 2020 found that only 11% of people remained indoors for the full time that they were required to quarantine.

The Cobra Effect is a term that basically refers to a scenario where the incentives designed to solve a problem not only don't work, but they actually backfire completely and end up making the whole situation worse than it was to start with.

The story goes that in colonial India, Delhi was suffering from this proliferation of venomous snakes.

And so the government placed a bounty on the snakes.

So if you turned up with a dead cobra, you would get paid for it.

Now this seemed like a good solution, you're incentivising people to go out and kill the snakes and initially it seemed successful but actually what ended up happening was as the population of cobras started to fall and so it became more difficult to go out and catch a cobra and get the bounty, some entrepreneurial citizens decided to start breeding cobras so that they could derive an income from going out and collecting those bounties.

So when the government then realised what was going on, they decided to completely scrap the scheme.

But then that meant that, of course, completely reasonably as well, all of these new cobra breeders decided to release all their cobras onto the streets.

And what you ended up with was an even bigger problem with cobras than you had to start with.

This might seem like a crazy story, but something very similar happened in around 2007 when

in the US with wild pigs in Georgia.

Well, in Georgia, they did the same thing.

So they were having this issue with all these wild pigs.

And so they started paying people to go out and shoot the pigs.

Except for what happened was people started actually going into neighbouring states, buying pigs from pig farms and collecting bounties.

in Georgia for pigs at which were never in Georgia to start with.

certain individuals who might face a relatively low risk from COVID-19, younger people, for example, actually potentially their perceived cost of going out and catching the virus might seem relatively low

compared to that £500 payment.

So I mean, really, the thing with the Cobra effect, in this context, I think it depends on which effect you think dominates the positive effect that incentivises sick people, say at home, or the negative effect that incentivises healthy people to go out and catch the virus.

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