I guess we have different standards as to what counts as a "black swan". To me, a black swan is an event that is genuinely unpredictable, and which has catastro

I guess we have different standards as to what counts as a "black swan". To me, a black swan is an event that is genuinely unpredictable, and which has catastrophic consequences. A large earthquake in California, for example, is not a black swan. Even though we may not know exactly when the earthquake will hit, we know that one is coming eventually, and therefore reasonable preparations should be taken in order to mitigate the damage. An earthquake in Kansas, on the other hand, would be a black swan. Kansas is not in what we currently understand to be a seismically active region, and thus I don't think it's reasonable to expect Kansas to have the same level of earthquake preparation as California (and vice versa for tornadoes). In this instance, I think the pandemic was a reasonable thing to anticipate (even if no one could have predicted the actual timing or cause). There were airborne viruses which had made the jump to humans from a wild reservoir in the past. While previous examples were more deadly and less transmissible, the current outbreak was not, as I understand it, far outside the confidence intervals that epidemiologists predicted. An example of a black swan in this instance would have been an organism that was as contagious as SARS-NCOV-2, but as deadly as Ebola. That would have broken many of our models (which hold that transmissibility is inversely correlated with deadliness). It would have caused us to significantly reconsider our models of viral evolution and disease mechanisms. In contrast, the current outbreak hasn't really caused anyone to reconsider their models of epidemiology. It's played out largely as many epidemiologists warned. For that reason, I don't think the current outbreak is a black swan, and I think that many of the people calling it a black swan are doing so as an excuse to dodge responsibility for failing to prepare. It's as if I failed to secure my shelves in California, and then when an earthquake hit, and all my crockery spilled to the floor, I claimed that it was a "black swan", because no one could have predicted the specific timing of this earthquake.