Pandemic is not a “black swan” event. A black swan is by definition something you cannot know exists until you discover it. We’ve known pandemic was a real threat for a long time. pandemic was largely considered a certainty by anyone who was knowledgeable in the subject.
Pretending something isn’t a threat is a far cry from it not existing and the fact that you’re conflating the two says a lot about why we’re in the situation we are. Pandemic was a certainty we refused to prepare for. Many consider nuclear war a certainty we refuse to prevent.
I agree with your premise, but let's just not forget that we're humans with a limited life-span and our brains aren't used to dealing with events that happen this rarely. It's understandable why we may all have been caught off-guard. It's a "black swan" relative to our understanding of life.
Last century was the Spanish Flu. The century before that was the Russian Flu. Viral pandemics seem to be a 100-year event, and meanwhile your bank has no trouble insisting that you carry flood insurance if you are building in the 100-year floodplain.
Was a pandemic really a black swan event? I'm pretty sure researchers had been warning about the possibility of one for a long while, plus we had SARS, H1N1, Ebola, etc. Of course, they're not exactly the same as COVID-19 but it's not like we didn't know pandemics could happen
This one is. None of those other diseases have such a long time period where people are presymptomatic and contagious, and that's the only reason that COVID-19 is out of control.
While your characterization is valid I wouldn't call it a black swan, just because some of the characteristics are surprising/unknown.
All the top virologists I heard say pretty much the same on that front: it is a special thing, but the idea that something like this could happen sooner or later was clear as day.
I'm not so sure, If people in command have had lived through the Spanish flu the situation would have been handled extremely different, such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
> such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
That's not what would have happened.
New Zealand has zero new daily cases only because it's an island. The same reason Hawaii has done so well relatively. It has almost been a month since Hawaii has had a Covid death. It's not because their lockdown measures have been magic, it's because they're an island, they got a massive artificial booster to their isolation efforts.
Well before it was understood to lock down all transportation, the virus was already spreading across the US and Europe, it was already too late. Direct experience with the Spanish Flu pandemic would have made zero difference to that. Practically nobody outside of China knew the virus was spreading in Wuhan or how serious it was for the first two months of the outbreak, starting in late October. By the time China stopped aggressively trying to conceal the nature of the virus outbreak (mid January), it had already spread to the US and Europe (in December).
All transportation globally would have had to have been locked down in mid November at the latest to have had a shot at stopping the spread. That's a fantasy scenario.
We only locked down mid-March, but we're back down to less than 2% of our peak and have been unlocking since end-April. Stopping the spread is easy, but it apparently requires a population that understands and is committed to hygienic measures.
Not at all. Even in the era of the Spanish flu there were no drastic restrictions like we have now while it killed a lot more people. Different times and different adversity to loss of human life.
Pretending something isn’t a threat is a far cry from it not existing and the fact that you’re conflating the two says a lot about why we’re in the situation we are. Pandemic was a certainty we refused to prepare for. Many consider nuclear war a certainty we refuse to prevent.