5 ms·

I submitted an article predicting Corona virus pandemic from 2013, but it wasn't upvoted: The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When: https://news.ycombinator.com/it

• jimbobimbo 7y ago
  I recon it didn't receive attention, because it's a trite observation, not prediction. "It's not if, but when there will be another recession." "It's not if, but when there will be another pandemic." "It's not if, but when another asteroid hit the Earth." We live in the real world, things happen more than once.
  • zaat 7y ago
    Yes, that's the headline. But the article is specifically about Corona and quite detailed: > Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans, other mammals and birds. ... > Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is continually being inaccurately copied — and when two virus strains infect a single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives them what one expert has called an “intrinsic evolvability,” a capacity to adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts. ... > Bats, though wondrous and necessary animals, do seem to be disproportionately implicated as reservoir hosts of new zoonotic viruses...
• casefields 7y ago
  I read The Coming Plague in the 90s: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balance/dp/0140250913/ https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Plague-Emerging-Diseases-Balan... These aren't hard predictions.