5 ms·

A bit unrelated, but I heard about this 2007 paper recently [1]: > The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with

A bit unrelated, but I heard about this 2007 paper recently [1]: > The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. I know the instant reaction is "people predict things all the time, some are bound to come out right", but this seems so specific that I think it's not just pure chance... we're just not heeding some of the warnings. ------ Now one reaction to the blog post: it does make a lot of good points (especially about masks), but for the part about shutting society at least, it doesn't seem to account for the follow-on effects of being wrong. If governments had shut things down due to a 10% chance of a pandemic, and it was prevented, chances are decent that a lot of not-similarly-reasoning people would've been angry. A lot of people, some for good reason and some for bad, just don't trust their governments (or the media) enough, and of those that do, a fair chunk are going under a lot of hardship to comply. So they don't just say "okay, I don't see it that way, but I trust you that this is for the best, even if it means I can't put bread on the table for my family, so I'll just live with the consequences and stay at home." Now I'm not really saying this is an excuse for governments/media to send poor messages, but it's an understandable human component... surely you can't attribute everything to irrational probabilistic reasoning? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2176051/#__sec26title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2176051/#__sec2...

meowface 7y ago
But if every government had acted much earlier, when the probability seemed to exceed 10%, there wouldn't have necessarily been any total shutdowns like what we're seeing now (except for the initial containment in China). There would still be some economic harm, but it'd be far, far less.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  What would've been there instead of a shutdown and how could that have avoided a shutdown? (Specifically thinking of the US here.)
  - undersuit 7y ago
    The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      > The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavi...
      - makomk 7y ago
        Yeah, there is probably nothing that the US could have done unilaterally which would have contained this. Italy was still reporting something like three total cases in mid-February. There was no more reason to quarantine or monitor travellers from there than there was anyone else in the country.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        You mean 3 total confirmed cases? Note that even South Korea was apparently monitoring everyone and suddenly 1 person slipped through and infected like a thousand people (read this recently, don't have the link handy).
        Izkata 7y ago
        Patient 31: https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTERS/0100B5G33SB/index.html https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTER...
        matthewdgreen 7y ago
        But the ending to that story is very different. South Korea did have an outbreak, but they contained it. That’s the counterfactual to “nobody could have prevented this.”
- grahamburger 7y ago
  If we took those measures every time there was a 10% chance of a pandemic would we be better off overall? Honest question I don't know the answer. It's easy to say we should have acted sooner, but should we have also done more for ebola, zika, SARS, MERS etc in the US as well, even though those didn't end up having much of an impact here?
  - angry_octet 7y ago
    We had this expectation that nothing was really important enough to interrupt international travel. Even as Hubei was put in lockdown the Chinese were allowing their citizens to travel the globe, including direct flights from Wuhan to international destinations, and applying extreme pressure on countries to not restrict their entry. Basically the system has too much delay to respond, even to a strong signal. Even significant local deaths in the US is not strong enough to change politics and media. If Ebola had broken out we would have had the same problem. I think we are stuck in a local maximum. It takes a significant push for the system to escape oscillating back to where we are.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Ebola has an African name so I bet it would have panicked westerners into a stronger response if covid was called ebola.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > Even as Hubei was put in lockdown the Chinese were allowing their citizens to travel the globe, including direct flights from Wuhan to international destinations What? I remember Hubei was shut down with airports, and the rest of the world had to scramble evac flights to retrieve their citizens from the area.
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        They announced the lockdown before it was put into effect, leading to a bomb burst of potential carriers escaping in the next 24H. Even after that, international commercial flights were allowed to depart.
vanniv 7y ago
> A lot of people, some for good reason and some for bad, just don't trust their governments (or the media) enough One only has to look around HN for posts about using the current crisis for various unrelated political and economic goals to understand why this might be. Why, just in the last three minutes on HN, I came across media sources advocating everything from nationalizing Amazon (now that it's "a public good" because of the crisis) to permanently banning the use of vehicles in cities (now that the crisis has shown how lovely the inner city air is when both cars and factories all stop). Nobody's willing to let a crisis "go to waste", and so nobody trusts anybody to be giving them true information untainted by their ulterior motives. Not trusting that the government and the media have your best interests at heart is simply being aware of how things are.
mirimir 7y ago
> I know the instant reaction is "people predict things all the time, some are bound to come out right", but this seems so specific that I think it's not just pure chance... we're just not heeding some of the warnings. Right. I had not seen this paper. But then, I'm just some anonymous coward who writes a lot about anonymity and privacy. But if I were, say, an epidemiologist specializing in viral diseases, I would likely have remembered this paper, as soon as I heard about the Wuhan outbreak. So what stopped that paper's authors from raising an alarm? And what about all the experts who had read it? And about TFA, given that it doesn't cite that paper, and so explore how it got ignored, it's hard to take it seriously.
ilkan 7y ago
I wouldn't say that they should have shut things down preemptively, but their job is to have up-to-date contingency plans and be ready to implement them when thresholds are crossed.
XorNot 7y ago
There wasn't a 10% chance of a pandemic once cases were in the US - it being a "pandemic" didn't matter. The nature of virus, it's incubation time, and the mortality rate all meant the US needed to go into lock down the moment cases started turning up state-side. This wasn't a long range problem by the time there were cases in the US - it was the early stage of the catastrophe starting, when it could have been much more cheaply prevented.

meowface 7y ago

But if every government had acted much earlier, when the probability seemed to exceed 10%, there wouldn't have necessarily been any total shutdowns like what we're seeing now (except for the initial containment in China). There would still be some economic harm, but it'd be far, far less.

mehrdadn 7y ago
What would've been there instead of a shutdown and how could that have avoided a shutdown? (Specifically thinking of the US here.)
- undersuit 7y ago
  The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    > The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavi...
    - makomk 7y ago
      Yeah, there is probably nothing that the US could have done unilaterally which would have contained this. Italy was still reporting something like three total cases in mid-February. There was no more reason to quarantine or monitor travellers from there than there was anyone else in the country.
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        You mean 3 total confirmed cases? Note that even South Korea was apparently monitoring everyone and suddenly 1 person slipped through and infected like a thousand people (read this recently, don't have the link handy).
        Izkata 7y ago
        Patient 31: https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTERS/0100B5G33SB/index.html https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTER...
        matthewdgreen 7y ago
        But the ending to that story is very different. South Korea did have an outbreak, but they contained it. That’s the counterfactual to “nobody could have prevented this.”
grahamburger 7y ago
If we took those measures every time there was a 10% chance of a pandemic would we be better off overall? Honest question I don't know the answer. It's easy to say we should have acted sooner, but should we have also done more for ebola, zika, SARS, MERS etc in the US as well, even though those didn't end up having much of an impact here?
- angry_octet 7y ago
  We had this expectation that nothing was really important enough to interrupt international travel. Even as Hubei was put in lockdown the Chinese were allowing their citizens to travel the globe, including direct flights from Wuhan to international destinations, and applying extreme pressure on countries to not restrict their entry. Basically the system has too much delay to respond, even to a strong signal. Even significant local deaths in the US is not strong enough to change politics and media. If Ebola had broken out we would have had the same problem. I think we are stuck in a local maximum. It takes a significant push for the system to escape oscillating back to where we are.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Ebola has an African name so I bet it would have panicked westerners into a stronger response if covid was called ebola.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Even as Hubei was put in lockdown the Chinese were allowing their citizens to travel the globe, including direct flights from Wuhan to international destinations What? I remember Hubei was shut down with airports, and the rest of the world had to scramble evac flights to retrieve their citizens from the area.
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      They announced the lockdown before it was put into effect, leading to a bomb burst of potential carriers escaping in the next 24H. Even after that, international commercial flights were allowed to depart.

vanniv 7y ago

> A lot of people, some for good reason and some for bad, just don't trust their governments (or the media) enough One only has to look around HN for posts about using the current crisis for various unrelated political and economic goals to understand why this might be. Why, just in the last three minutes on HN, I came across media sources advocating everything from nationalizing Amazon (now that it's "a public good" because of the crisis) to permanently banning the use of vehicles in cities (now that the crisis has shown how lovely the inner city air is when both cars and factories all stop). Nobody's willing to let a crisis "go to waste", and so nobody trusts anybody to be giving them true information untainted by their ulterior motives. Not trusting that the government and the media have your best interests at heart is simply being aware of how things are.

mirimir 7y ago

> I know the instant reaction is "people predict things all the time, some are bound to come out right", but this seems so specific that I think it's not just pure chance... we're just not heeding some of the warnings. Right. I had not seen this paper. But then, I'm just some anonymous coward who writes a lot about anonymity and privacy. But if I were, say, an epidemiologist specializing in viral diseases, I would likely have remembered this paper, as soon as I heard about the Wuhan outbreak. So what stopped that paper's authors from raising an alarm? And what about all the experts who had read it? And about TFA, given that it doesn't cite that paper, and so explore how it got ignored, it's hard to take it seriously.

ilkan 7y ago

I wouldn't say that they should have shut things down preemptively, but their job is to have up-to-date contingency plans and be ready to implement them when thresholds are crossed.

XorNot 7y ago

There wasn't a 10% chance of a pandemic once cases were in the US - it being a "pandemic" didn't matter. The nature of virus, it's incubation time, and the mortality rate all meant the US needed to go into lock down the moment cases started turning up state-side. This wasn't a long range problem by the time there were cases in the US - it was the early stage of the catastrophe starting, when it could have been much more cheaply prevented.