[aschatten]

It's very hard to incorporate events like this into a financial model. With chronic disease like diabetes or cancer they can get a pretty good forecast of demand, so it's translates into a clearer understanding of ROI with higher confidence: more they invest the more they get plus some error, but even the error won't offset the forecast by much. With epidemics, not only you need to predict when, but also what kind of virus it's gonna be. The reward is great, but so is the risk. Would you invest $100 to almost surely get back ($130 +/- $5), or $1000 with a potential outcome of $10000, but very low confidence that it is going to happen at all before you run out of money.

Similar to financial crisis, if the next one could be predicted, it wouldn't happen.