I certainly expect status games, above and beyond power games. Actually saying ‘power games’ was the wrong choice of words in my comment. Thank you for pointing this out!
That being said, I don’t think the situation you describe is fully accurate. You describe group meetings as an arena for status (in the office), whereas I think instead they are primarily a tool for forcing cooperation. The social aspect still dominates the decision making aspect*, but the meeting is positive sum in that it can unify a group into acting towards a certain solution, even if that is not the best solution available.
*I think this is the main reason so many people are confused by the alleged inefficiency of meetings. If you have a difficult problem and no good candidate solutions it is in my experience basically never optimal to ask a group of people at once and hope they collectively solve it. Recognizing that this is at best a side-effect of group meetings cleared up a lot of confusion for me.
I’ve been trying to understand this discussion (and I agree that this is one of the central questions for the model of how things will progress from here, in particular if March-style lockdowns will be sufficient or not to halt the spread of this strain). But now I’m mainly confused—isn’t such a dramatic increase in Rt incompatible with the slower increase in the graph, as pointed out by CellBioGuy?
Edit: I’ve read yesterday’s PHE investigation report, and they do explicitly confirm it is an increase of over +0.5 to the Rt under the conditions in England in weeks 44-49 of this year. So this seems like the bad possible interpretation, where it really does spread significantly more.