Category: magical thinking

Researching viral preferences

Keith S. Taber

When I was listening to the radio news I heard a clip of the Rt. Hon. Sajid Javid MP, the U.K. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, talking about the ongoing response to the COVID pandemic:

"Now that we are entering Autumn and Winter, something that COVID and other viruses, you know, usually like, the prime minister this week will be getting out our plans to manage COVID over the coming few months."

Sajid Javid

So, COVID and other viruses usually like Autumn and Winter (by implication, presumably, in comparison with Spring and Summer).

This got me wondering how we (or Sajid, at least) could know what the COVID virus (i.e., SARS-CoV-2 – severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) prefers – what the virus 'likes'. I noticed that Mr Javid offered a modal qualification to his claim: usually. It seemed 'COVID and other viruses' did not always like Autumn and Winter, but usually did.

Yet there was a potential ambiguity here depending how one parsed the claim. Was he suggesting that

[COVID and other viruses] usually like Autumn and Winter

or

COVID [and other viruses usually] like Autumn and Winter

This might have been clearer in a written text as either

COVID and other viruses usually like Autumn and Winter

or

COVID, and other viruses usually, like Autumn and Winter

The second option may seem a little awkward in its phrasing, ¹ but then not all viral diseases are more common in the Winter months, and some are considered to be due to 'Summer viruses':

"Adenovirus, human bocavirus (HBoV), parainfluenza virus (PIV), human metapneumovirus (hMPV), and rhinovirus can be detected throughout the year (all-year viruses). Seasonal patterns of PIV are type specific. Epidemics of PIV type 1 (PIV1) and PIV type 3 (PIV3) peak in the fall [Autumn] and spring-summer, respectively. The prevalence of some non-rhinovirus enteroviruses increases in summer (summer viruses)"

Moriyama, Hugentobler & Iwasaki, 2020: 86

Just a couple of days later Mr Javid was being interviewed on the radio, and he made a more limited claim:

"…because we know Autumn and Winter, your COVID is going to like that time of year"

Sajid Javid

So, this claim was just about the COVID virus, not viruses more generally, and that we know that COVID is going to like Autumn and Winter. No ambiguity there. But how do we know?

Coming to knowledge

Historically there have been various ways of obtaining knowledge.

• Divine revelation: where God reveals the knowledge to someone, perhaps through appearing to the chosen one in a dream.
• Consulting an oracle, or a prophet or some other kind of seer.
• Intuiting the truth by reflecting on the nature of things using the rational power of the human intellect.
• Empirical investigation of natural phenomena.

My focus in this blog is related to science, and given that we are talking about public health policy in modern Britain, I would like to think Mr Javid was basing his claim on the latter option. Of course, even empirical methods depend upon some metaphysical assumptions. For example, if one assumes the cosmos has inbuilt connections one might look for evidence in terms of sympathies or correspondences. Perhaps, if the COVID virus was observed closely and looked like a snowflake, that could (in this mindset) be taken as a sign that it liked Winter.

Sympathetic magic

This kind of correspondence, a connection indicated by appearance, was once widely accepted, so that a plant which was thought to resemble some part of the anatomy might be assumed to be an appropriate medicine for diseases or disorders associated with that part of the body.

This is a kind of magic, and might seem a 'primitive' belief to many people today, but such an idea was sensible enough in the context of a common set of underlying beliefs about the nature and purposes of the world, and the place and role of people in that world. One might expect that specific beliefs would soon die out if, for example, the plant shaped like an ear turned out to do nothing for ear ache. Yet, at a time when medical practitioners could offer little effective treatment, and being sent to a hospital was likely to reduce life expectancy, herbal remedies at least often (if not always) did no harm.

Moreover, many herbs do have medicinal properties, and something with a general systemic effect might work as topical medicine (i.e., when applied to a specific site of disease). Add to that, the human susceptibility to confirmation bias (taking more notice of, and giving more weight to, instances that meet our expectations than those which do not) and the placebo effect (where believing we are taking effective medication can sometimes in itself have beneficial effects) and the psychological support offered by spending time with an attentive practitioner with a good 'bedside' manner – and we can easily see how beliefs about treatments may survive limited definitive evidence of effectiveness.

The gold standard of experimental method

Of course, today, we have the means to test such medicines by taking a large representative sample of a population (of ear ache sufferers, or whatever), randomly dividing them into two groups, and using a double-blind (or should that be double-deaf) approach, treat them with the possible medicine or a placebo, without either the patient or the practitioner knowing who was getting which treatment. (The researchers have a way to know of course – or it would difficult to deduce anything from the results.) That is, the randomised control trial (RCT).

Now, I have been very critical of the notion that these kinds of randomised experimental designs should be automatically be seen as the preferred way of testing educational innovations (Taber, 2019) – but in situations where control of variables and 'blinding' is possible, and where randomisation can be applied to samples of well-defined populations, this does deserve to be considered the gold standard. (It is when the assumptions behind a research methodology do not apply that we should have reservations about using it as a strategy for enquiry.)

So can the RCT approach be used to find out if COVID has a preference for certain times of year? I guess this depends on our conceptual framework for the research (e.g., how do we understand what a 'like' actually is) and the theoretical perspective we adopt.

So, for example, behaviourists would suggest that it is not useful to investigate what is going on in someone's mind (perhaps some behaviorists do not even think the mind concept corresponds to anything real) so we should observe behaviours that allow us to make inferences. This has to be done with care. Someone who buys and eats lots of chocolate presumably likes chocolate, and someone who buys and listens to a lot of reggae probably likes reggae, but a person who cries regularly, or someone that stumbles around and has frequent falls, does not necessary like crying, or falling over, respectively.

A viral choice chamber

So, we might think that woodlice prefer damp conditions because we have put a large number of woodlice in choice chambers with different conditions (dry and light, dry and dark, damp and light, damp and dark) and found that there was a statistically significant excess of woodlice settling down in the damp sections of the chamber.

Of course, to infer preferences from behaviour – or even to use the term 'behaviour' – for some kinds of entity is questionable. (To think that woodlice make a choice based on what they 'like' might seem to assume a level of awareness that they perhaps lack?) In a cathode ray tube electrons subject to a magnetic field may be observed (indirectly!) to move to one side of the tube, just as woodlice might congregate in one chamber, but I am not sure I would describe this as electrons liking that part of the tube. I think it can be better explained with concepts such as electrical charge, fields, forces, and momentum.

It is difficult to see how we can do double blind trials to see which season a virus might like, as if the COVID virus really does like Winter, it must surely have a way of knowing when it is Winter (making blinding impossible). In any case, a choice chamber with different sections at different times of the year would require some kind of time portal installed between its sections.

Like electrons, but unlike woodlice, COVID viral particles do not have an active form of transport available to them. Rather, they tend to be sneezed and coughed around and then subject to the breeze, or deposited by contact with surfaces. So I am not sure that observing virus 'behaviour' helps here.

So perhaps a different methodology might be more sensible.

A viral opinion poll

A common approach to find out what people like would be a survey. Surveys can sometimes attract responses from large numbers of respondents, which may seem to give us confidence that they offer authentic accounts of widespread views. However, sample size is perhaps less important than sample representativeness. Imagine carrying out a survey of people's favourite football teams at a game at Stamford Bridge; or undertaking a survey of people's favourite bands as people queued to enter a King Crimson concert! The responses may [sic, almost certainly would] not fully reflect the wider population due to the likely bias in such samples. Would these surveys give reliable results which could be replicated if repeated at the Santiago Bernabeu or at a Marillion concert?

A representative sample of vairants?

This might cause problems with the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2). What counts as a member of the population – perhaps a viable virus particle? Can we even know how big the population actually is at the time of our survey? The virus is infecting new cells, leading to new virus particles being produced all the time, just as shed particles become non-viable all the time. So we have no reliable knowledge of population numbers.

Moreover, a survey needs a representative sample: do the numbers of people in a sample of a human population reflect the wider population in relevant terms (be that age, gender, level of educational qualifications, earnings, etc.)? There are viral variants leading to COVID-19 infection – and quite a few of them. That is, SARS-CoV-2 is a class with various subgroups. The variants replicate to different extents under particular conditions, and new variants appear from time to time.

So, the population profile is changing rapidly. In recent months in the UK nearly all infections where the variant has been determined are due to the variant VOC-21APR-02 (or B.1.617.2 or Delta) but many people will be infected asymptotically or with mild symptoms and not be tested, and so this likely does not mean that VOC-21APR-02 dominates the SARS-CoV-2 population as a whole to the extent it currently dominates in investigated cases. Assuming otherwise would be like gauging public opinion from the views of those particular people who make themselves salient by attending a protest, e.g.:

"Shock finding – 98% of the population would like to abolish the nuclear arsenal,

according to a [hypothetical] survey taken at the recent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march"

In any case, surveys are often fairly blunt instruments as they need to present objectively the same questions to all respondents, and elicit responses in a format that can be readily classified into a discrete number of categories. This is why many questionnaires use Likert type items:

Would you say you like Autumn and Winter:

1	2	3	4	5
Always	Nearly always	Usually	Sometimes	Never

Such 'objective' measures are often considered to avoid the subjective nature of some other types of research. It may seem that responses do not need to be interpreted – but of course this assumes that the researchers and all the respondents understand language the same way (what exactly counts as Autumn and Winter? What does 'like' mean? How is 'usually' understood – 60-80% of the time, or 51-90% of the time or…). We can usually (sic) safely assume that those with strong language competence will have somewhat similar understandings of terms, but we cannot know precisely what survey participants meant by their responses or to what extent they share a meaning for 'usually'.

There are so-called 'qualitative surveys' which eschew this kind of objectivity to get more in-depth engagement with participants. They will usually use interviews where the researcher can establish rapport with respondents and ask them about their thoughts and feelings, observe non-verbal signals such as facial expressions and gestures, and use follow-up questions… However, the greater insight into individuals comes at a cost of smaller samples as these kinds of methods are more resource-intensive.

But perhaps Mr Javid does not actually mean that COVID likes Autumn and Winter?

So, how did the Department of Health & Social Care, or the Health Secretary's scientific advisors, find out that COVID (or the COVID virus) likes Autumn and Winter? The virus does not think, or feel, and it does not have preferences in the way we do. It does not perceive hot or cold, and it does not have a sense of time passing, or of the seasons.² COVID does not like or dislike anything.

Mr Javid needs to make himself clear to a broad public audience, so he has to avoid too much technical jargon. It is not easy to pitch a presentation for such an audience and be pithy, accurate, and engaging, but it is easy for someone (such as me) to be critical when not having to face this challenge. Cabinet ministers, unlike science teachers, cannot be expected to have skills in communicating complex and abstract scientific ideas in simplified and accessible forms that remain authentic to the science.

It is easy and perhaps convenient to use anthropomorphic language to talk about the virus, and this will likely make the topic seem accessible to listeners, but it is less clear what is actually meant by a virus liking a certain time of year. In teaching the use of anthropomorphic language can be engaging, but it can also come to stand in place of scientific understanding when anthropomorphic statements are simply accepted uncritically at face value. For example, if the science teacher suggests "the atom wants a full shell of electrons" then we should not be surprised that students may think this is a scientific explanation, and that atoms do want to fill their shells. (They do not of course. ³)

Of course Mr Javid's statements cannot be taken as a literal claim about what the virus likes – my point in this posting is to provoke the question of what this might be intended to mean? This is surely intended metaphorically (at least if Mr Javid had thought about his claim critically): perhaps that there is higher incidence of infection or serious illness caused by the COVID virus in the Winter. But by that logic, I guess turkeys really would vote for Christmas (or Thanksgiving) after all.

Typically, some viruses cause more infection in the Winter when people are more likely to mix indoors and when buildings and transport are not well ventilated (both factors being addressed in public health measures and advice in regard to COVID-19). Perhaps 'likes' here simply means that the conditions associated with a higher frequency/population of virus particles occur in Autumn and Winter?

However, this is some way from assigning 'likes' to the virus. After all, in evolutionary terms, a virus might 'prefer', so to speak, to only be transmitted asymptomatically, as it cannot be in the virus's 'interests', so to speak, to encourage a public health response that will lead to vaccines or measures to limit the mixing of people.

If COVID could like anything (and of course it cannot), I would suggest it would like to go 'under the radar' (another metaphor) and be endemic in a population that was not concerned about it (perhaps doing so little harm it is not even noticed, such that people do not change their behaviours). It would then only 'prefer' a Season to the extent that that time of year brings conditions which allow it to go about its life cycle without attracting attention – from Mr Javid or anyone else.

Keith S. Taber, September 2021

Addendum: 1st December 2021

Déjà vu?

"…we have always known that when it gets darker, it gets colder, the virus likes that, the flu virus likes that and we should not forget that's still lurking around as well…"

Rt. Hon. Sajid Javid MP, the U.K. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Today programme, 1st December, 2021

Works cited:

• Moriyama, M., Hugentobler, W. J., & Iwasaki, A. (2020). Seasonality of Respiratory Viral Infections. Annual Review of Virology, 7(1), 83-101. doi:10.1146/annurev-virology-012420-022445
• Taber, K. S. (2019). Experimental research into teaching innovations: responding to methodological and ethical challenges. Studies in Science Education, 55(1), 69-119. doi:10.1080/03057267.2019.1658058

Footnotes:

¹. It would also seem to be a generalisation based on the only two Winters that the COVID-19 virus had 'experienced'

². Strictly I cannot know what it is like to be a virus particle. But a lot of well-established and strongly evidenced scientific principles would be challenged if a virus particle is sentient.

³. Yet this is a VERY common alternative conceptions among school children studying chemistry: The full outer shells explanatory principle

Related reading:

So who's not a clever little virus then?

COVID is like a fire because…

Anthropomorphism in public science discourse