4 ms·

>Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good

>Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries. It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.

lrem 6y ago
Huh? As far as I know most countries already do that more often than you ask for. Everyone had a strong response to the 2009 pandemic, with plans, PPE stockpiles and such. The virus turned out very mild, which lead to heeding to the advice of epidemiologists to be politically costly. But in the USA pandemic preparedness was only effectively disassembled with the 2017 update.
- vharuck 6y ago
  As an employee of a state department of health, I can honestly say we were blindsided and had no plan. At most, our plan was "Do what the CDC says." Even if the CDC had been on top of things, much more could've been done and planned.
  - lrem 6y ago
    Well sure, but all this is a somewhat-conscious decision by politicians: "basing on experience, doing the pandemic preparations as advised by epidemiologists is more expensive than absorbing a pandemic not prepared (even if that somehow happens during our term)".

lrem 6y ago

Huh? As far as I know most countries already do that more often than you ask for. Everyone had a strong response to the 2009 pandemic, with plans, PPE stockpiles and such. The virus turned out very mild, which lead to heeding to the advice of epidemiologists to be politically costly. But in the USA pandemic preparedness was only effectively disassembled with the 2017 update.

vharuck 6y ago
As an employee of a state department of health, I can honestly say we were blindsided and had no plan. At most, our plan was "Do what the CDC says." Even if the CDC had been on top of things, much more could've been done and planned.
- lrem 6y ago
  Well sure, but all this is a somewhat-conscious decision by politicians: "basing on experience, doing the pandemic preparations as advised by epidemiologists is more expensive than absorbing a pandemic not prepared (even if that somehow happens during our term)".