[atlasunshrugged]

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

[josephcsible]

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.

[atoav]

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.

[mattigames]

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.

[ddeck]

I'm not so sure it would have been. Many officials likely lived through the Hong Kong flu in 1968, which killed an estimated 1 to 4 million people.

Far fewer than the Spanish Flu, but a much more recent reminder.

[adventured]

> 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.

[082349872349872]

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.

[ekianjo]

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.