6 ms·

You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably wa

You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk. The spread of coronavirus outside China was in no way inevitable. Several potential pandemics were handled internally, this one escaped due to denial and incompetence, at which point it was harder to control. If it is utterly predictable we should be able to predict its course and fatalities - we can't. If we had a large asteroid strike, famine, a robot rebellion, a collapse in world supply chains or super-volcano eruption it'd be 'inevitable' according to somebody somewhere, but most of the world didn't expect it and didn't prepare for it.

osrec 6y ago
> didn't prepare for it. Correct, we didn't prepare for it. I would even say that politics stifled our response to a large degree. But, in my opinion, to say we didn't expect it, is incorrect. Sure, the average Joe may not have understood the potential risks, however epidemiologists were literally screaming the graveness of the situation at the public. The fact that people decided not to take heed was their ineptitude. The science and logic required to reduce the impact of the virus were all available, and the actions to be taken were fairly simple. The fact that people refused to take those actions in a timely manner, and that governments prioritised economy over public health are some of the reasons why we're in this mess. But we certainly were not caught by surprise - we had the time to react, and the knowledge to react well.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  The thing is they actually have not prioritised anything, they thought they were prioritising, but actually caused a deeper recession by failing to contain the virus. It's like prioritising cooking dinner over dealing with the house fire - it doesn't work that way.
lazyasciiart 6y ago
What about the set of events that "someone somewhere spent millions of dollars on and defined it as a national security risk and set up federally managed groups and processes to guard against it"? Seems to be a slightly smaller set.
mitchdoogle 6y ago
At several points along the way, scientific experts (not one or a handful, but many) have made recommendations that were ignored by world leaders because they were seen as financially or politically costly. Most of the disasters you mention are definitely predictable and we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that they will occur within the next x years. If x is anything more than 100, then people will ignore it, because our brains are biased to discount the odds of bad things happening to us. We should at the least have a basic plan on what to do if those things happen, but it seems that many places didn't even accomplish that before this predictable pandemic occurred.
FuckButtons 6y ago
I don’t agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence, they didn’t help, but fundamentally this spread because most people don’t get that sick. Since people mostly feel ok, they’re not getting medical treatment and aren’t on the radar of any kind of intervention. Also, it’s not true to say that if you can say with certainty that something will happen, you know exactly how it’s going to go down. I know with 100% certainty that there will be another stock market bubble in the next 20 years, it’s completely predictable, but I can’t tell you when or how, because that is a different kind of knowledge, it’s situational rather than systemic.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  Technically if it happens in 21 years your 100% confident prediction is wrong. You'd still feel you kinda got it right, though. Certainty is a different beast. Not even "Tomorrow the sun will raise in the morning" can reach 100% certainty.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  > I don’t agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence Indeed.There are countries that reacted better than others, but that didn't make the problem go away: it was still a major disruption to the economy and a major health problem causing some people to die. The magnitude of those problems is affected by competence (and luck), but it's not one of those things where if you play by the book you're just going to be fine.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Yeah you are gonna be fine, not toally unaffected by largely just fine. Look at Czech Republic, Vietnam, Korea, Japan. There, hardly anyone died at all.
    - chimprich 6y ago
      I'm in no way disagreeing that countries like Vietnam have done a good job in keeping on top of the problem, but talking about any country's response in the past tense seems premature. Pretty much any assessment needs to have a "so far" appended.
mike_ivanov 6y ago
Taleb actually predicted it, even though he doesn't like it being called a prediction. In his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI
- refurb 6y ago
  So did Bill Gates, but predicting “a disease epidemic will hit us and have severe consequences” is a pretty sure bet and not that impressive.
  - landryraccoon 6y ago
    It sounds impressive considering that politicians argued (and still argue, like in the case of Brazil) that it's not severe and we are still overreacting in the middle of people dying.
  - mike_ivanov 6y ago
    That's exactly the point: if it IS easily predictable, it's NOT a black swan.
ascorbic 6y ago
This wasn't "someone, somewhere" predicting it though: every epidemiologist predicted it. They said flu was the most likely, but they all also said a SARS-like coronavirus was another potential option (haemorrhagic fevers were the other type warned about). SARS and MERS weren't that long ago, and both had pandemic potential. Two near misses in the past 20 years means this was always a case of when not if.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  The US had made preparations for a pandemic after SARS / MERS, but the funding was cut and the stockpile was neglected and had to be discarded. The advisories were given, people were aware, the system works, the people did their jobs. But the higher ups decided not to act, causing the biggest wave of deaths in living history. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92448/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92448/
  - ascorbic 6y ago
    Yes, and similar scenes played out everywhere that wasn't affected by SARS or MERS: they produced plans, issued advisories, but the politicians didn't act. Countries that were affected by SARS learnt their lesson, which is why they've dealt with this so much more effectively.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Several eastern european countries acted promptly- Czech Repibloc, Slovakia, Poland - without ever having much to do with SARS or MERS. Every country that made masks mandatory and distributed them effectively, did well.
      - grey-area 6y ago
        Masks were not mandatory in South Korea till well past the peak, though they are commonly worn. Masks were not used in New Zealand which has had one of the best responses. Masks are a useful low-cost measure but they're not sufficient on their own, quarantine and test and trace is far more effective and is probably what allowed those countries to get on top of their outbreaks so quickly, though honestly I'm not sure anybody knows the answers as yet about variations in infection and spread - we'll know a lot more in a few years in retrospect. There's a common thread in most of the countries that have done incredibly badly though - the leaders have downplayed the risk and refused to take common sense measures to stop the spread (UK, Brazil, US). http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200517000260 http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200517000260
pbourke 6y ago
> but most of the world didn't expect it and didn't prepare for it. You cannot say this about the United States. Both of the prior administrations developed detailed pandemic response plans. Bush’s plan was informed by the "near miss" of a worrying H5N1 Influenza outbreak. Obama dealt with Ebola and Zika. The Trump administration’s response to SARS-CoV-2 was so catastrophically incompetent that it nearly seems intentional. James Fallows has a very detailed piece that covers this: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/how-white-house-coronavirus-response-went-wrong/613591/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/how-whi...
auggierose 6y ago
They even made a freaking movie about it (Contagion). So I'd say it was absolutely predictable.
- jansan 6y ago
  By that rationale, a two headed shark attack near an atoll that is collapsing into itself is absolutely predictable, too.
  - landryraccoon 6y ago
    If it actually happens then yes. By definition if someone says there will be a two headed shark attack near an atoll and it actually happens they made the correct prediction. I'd sure start taking two headed shark experts very seriously in that case.
DarthGhandi 6y ago
It was in Europe months before it was detected in China. Seems pretty inevitable that it would have spread.
- jialutu 6y ago
  Here is a paper to back up your claims, where they apparently found traces of COVID-19 in Spain in March 2019. The paper is yet to be peer reviewed though: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...
  - acqq 6y ago
    It's an extraordinary claim but completely without evidence. I've been following that, the only thing that is known is that there were some reactions activating tests, observed with the samples from March 2019, but not the whole virus, not even more markers, but just the two. Something like "a chemical probe that tests for presence of two times 10 letters", whereas a virus is something having 30000 letters. False positives using these kind of tests are possible, and even the "contamination" of the samples, and there isn't any demonstration that the authors made sure that wasn't a false positive. Even worse, apparently nothing was actually isolated and preserved from the samples, in order to reproduce that, or isolate more letters, more a case of "the dog ate their homework" -- if I understood they claim they don't have the samples anymore? In short: these researches used the search for 20 letters in the sample, which sometimes lies, even if that virus has 30000 letters, and they can't show that it wasn't a false positive. And even if the 20 letters have been there (only that month -- very improbable!), there's no sign that a whole virus has been. The result from March 2019 is at the moment something that "needs more investigation" (if there is any material that can be tested again) but the presence of the virus during that month can't be established from that recently reported result. Edit: the specification of the IP2 and IP4 gene tests that gave result in March 2019 sample: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/real-time-rt-pcr-assays-for-the-detection-of-sars-cov-2-institut-pasteur-paris.pdf https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/real-ti...
    - 6y ago
jfoster 6y ago
No. Pandemics keep happening repeatedly and based on the past ~100 years, you'd be inclined to say that the frequency may be increasing: 1918, HIV, 1957, 1968, 2020. (and particularly so if you factor in the near-misses: SARS and MERS)
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk. Before this pandemic people wouldn't care. Now it's happen people like you are still trying to justify it away. Well, if you'd spoken to any epidemiologist (and I have) they'd have warned this was coming. It was inevitable. Before: "nah, it won't happen". Now: "well, you can say anything in retrospect". This is the superpower of human stupidity, it can dismiss anything inconvenient.
- grey-area 6y ago
  I'm not attempting to justify or defend the US or the Chinese pandemic response to Coronavirus (both of which were awful). I'm saying it was not utterly predictable in the course of its spread. The extent of the spread would have surprised most people, including epidemiologists if you asked them in January - precisely because we have encountered very similar viruses before and managed to contain them - it was always a possibility, but was considered by most of the world a remote one. Indeed, epidemiologists and governments in many countries knew about the virus in February, but not all reacted appropriately as they'd seen many such warnings before and for previous viruses it was contained and not a risk. There's swine flu in humans in multiple locations in China at the moment and it is likely to evolve to jump human to human - are you personally preparing for it to spread in the US now? If not why not since its spread is, like coronavirus, inevitable? Human stupidity also lends itself to retrospective reframing of events as inevitable and easily predictable when they are neither - it's easy to say everyone knew what was coming when talking in retrospect and very hard to accurately asses risk or probability.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    > I'm not attempting to justify or defend... That's irrelevant > The extent of the spread would have surprised most people... But not epidemiologists. > precisely because we have encountered very similar viruses before and managed to contain them Epidemiologists knew it was coming, and knew one would escape the net. They knew it. I spoke to several personally during when this happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic and I started to listen. They knew it. Don't pretend otherwise. > If not why not since its spread is, like coronavirus, inevitable? So first you claim it's unpredictable, then you acknowledge it's inevitable. Keep your eyes shut and everything's going to be alright.

osrec 6y ago

> didn't prepare for it. Correct, we didn't prepare for it. I would even say that politics stifled our response to a large degree. But, in my opinion, to say we didn't expect it, is incorrect. Sure, the average Joe may not have understood the potential risks, however epidemiologists were literally screaming the graveness of the situation at the public. The fact that people decided not to take heed was their ineptitude. The science and logic required to reduce the impact of the virus were all available, and the actions to be taken were fairly simple. The fact that people refused to take those actions in a timely manner, and that governments prioritised economy over public health are some of the reasons why we're in this mess. But we certainly were not caught by surprise - we had the time to react, and the knowledge to react well.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
The thing is they actually have not prioritised anything, they thought they were prioritising, but actually caused a deeper recession by failing to contain the virus. It's like prioritising cooking dinner over dealing with the house fire - it doesn't work that way.

lazyasciiart 6y ago

What about the set of events that "someone somewhere spent millions of dollars on and defined it as a national security risk and set up federally managed groups and processes to guard against it"? Seems to be a slightly smaller set.

mitchdoogle 6y ago

At several points along the way, scientific experts (not one or a handful, but many) have made recommendations that were ignored by world leaders because they were seen as financially or politically costly. Most of the disasters you mention are definitely predictable and we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that they will occur within the next x years. If x is anything more than 100, then people will ignore it, because our brains are biased to discount the odds of bad things happening to us. We should at the least have a basic plan on what to do if those things happen, but it seems that many places didn't even accomplish that before this predictable pandemic occurred.

FuckButtons 6y ago

I don’t agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence, they didn’t help, but fundamentally this spread because most people don’t get that sick. Since people mostly feel ok, they’re not getting medical treatment and aren’t on the radar of any kind of intervention. Also, it’s not true to say that if you can say with certainty that something will happen, you know exactly how it’s going to go down. I know with 100% certainty that there will be another stock market bubble in the next 20 years, it’s completely predictable, but I can’t tell you when or how, because that is a different kind of knowledge, it’s situational rather than systemic.

ithkuil 6y ago
Technically if it happens in 21 years your 100% confident prediction is wrong. You'd still feel you kinda got it right, though. Certainty is a different beast. Not even "Tomorrow the sun will raise in the morning" can reach 100% certainty.
ithkuil 6y ago
> I don’t agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence Indeed.There are countries that reacted better than others, but that didn't make the problem go away: it was still a major disruption to the economy and a major health problem causing some people to die. The magnitude of those problems is affected by competence (and luck), but it's not one of those things where if you play by the book you're just going to be fine.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Yeah you are gonna be fine, not toally unaffected by largely just fine. Look at Czech Republic, Vietnam, Korea, Japan. There, hardly anyone died at all.
  - chimprich 6y ago
    I'm in no way disagreeing that countries like Vietnam have done a good job in keeping on top of the problem, but talking about any country's response in the past tense seems premature. Pretty much any assessment needs to have a "so far" appended.

mike_ivanov 6y ago

Taleb actually predicted it, even though he doesn't like it being called a prediction. In his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI

refurb 6y ago
So did Bill Gates, but predicting “a disease epidemic will hit us and have severe consequences” is a pretty sure bet and not that impressive.
- landryraccoon 6y ago
  It sounds impressive considering that politicians argued (and still argue, like in the case of Brazil) that it's not severe and we are still overreacting in the middle of people dying.
- mike_ivanov 6y ago
  That's exactly the point: if it IS easily predictable, it's NOT a black swan.

ascorbic 6y ago

This wasn't "someone, somewhere" predicting it though: every epidemiologist predicted it. They said flu was the most likely, but they all also said a SARS-like coronavirus was another potential option (haemorrhagic fevers were the other type warned about). SARS and MERS weren't that long ago, and both had pandemic potential. Two near misses in the past 20 years means this was always a case of when not if.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
The US had made preparations for a pandemic after SARS / MERS, but the funding was cut and the stockpile was neglected and had to be discarded. The advisories were given, people were aware, the system works, the people did their jobs. But the higher ups decided not to act, causing the biggest wave of deaths in living history. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92448/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92448/
- ascorbic 6y ago
  Yes, and similar scenes played out everywhere that wasn't affected by SARS or MERS: they produced plans, issued advisories, but the politicians didn't act. Countries that were affected by SARS learnt their lesson, which is why they've dealt with this so much more effectively.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Several eastern european countries acted promptly- Czech Repibloc, Slovakia, Poland - without ever having much to do with SARS or MERS. Every country that made masks mandatory and distributed them effectively, did well.
    - grey-area 6y ago
      Masks were not mandatory in South Korea till well past the peak, though they are commonly worn. Masks were not used in New Zealand which has had one of the best responses. Masks are a useful low-cost measure but they're not sufficient on their own, quarantine and test and trace is far more effective and is probably what allowed those countries to get on top of their outbreaks so quickly, though honestly I'm not sure anybody knows the answers as yet about variations in infection and spread - we'll know a lot more in a few years in retrospect. There's a common thread in most of the countries that have done incredibly badly though - the leaders have downplayed the risk and refused to take common sense measures to stop the spread (UK, Brazil, US). http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200517000260 http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200517000260

pbourke 6y ago

> but most of the world didn't expect it and didn't prepare for it. You cannot say this about the United States. Both of the prior administrations developed detailed pandemic response plans. Bush’s plan was informed by the "near miss" of a worrying H5N1 Influenza outbreak. Obama dealt with Ebola and Zika. The Trump administration’s response to SARS-CoV-2 was so catastrophically incompetent that it nearly seems intentional. James Fallows has a very detailed piece that covers this: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/how-white-house-coronavirus-response-went-wrong/613591/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/how-whi...

auggierose 6y ago

They even made a freaking movie about it (Contagion). So I'd say it was absolutely predictable.

jansan 6y ago
By that rationale, a two headed shark attack near an atoll that is collapsing into itself is absolutely predictable, too.
- landryraccoon 6y ago
  If it actually happens then yes. By definition if someone says there will be a two headed shark attack near an atoll and it actually happens they made the correct prediction. I'd sure start taking two headed shark experts very seriously in that case.

DarthGhandi 6y ago

It was in Europe months before it was detected in China. Seems pretty inevitable that it would have spread.

jialutu 6y ago
Here is a paper to back up your claims, where they apparently found traces of COVID-19 in Spain in March 2019. The paper is yet to be peer reviewed though: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...
- acqq 6y ago
  It's an extraordinary claim but completely without evidence. I've been following that, the only thing that is known is that there were some reactions activating tests, observed with the samples from March 2019, but not the whole virus, not even more markers, but just the two. Something like "a chemical probe that tests for presence of two times 10 letters", whereas a virus is something having 30000 letters. False positives using these kind of tests are possible, and even the "contamination" of the samples, and there isn't any demonstration that the authors made sure that wasn't a false positive. Even worse, apparently nothing was actually isolated and preserved from the samples, in order to reproduce that, or isolate more letters, more a case of "the dog ate their homework" -- if I understood they claim they don't have the samples anymore? In short: these researches used the search for 20 letters in the sample, which sometimes lies, even if that virus has 30000 letters, and they can't show that it wasn't a false positive. And even if the 20 letters have been there (only that month -- very improbable!), there's no sign that a whole virus has been. The result from March 2019 is at the moment something that "needs more investigation" (if there is any material that can be tested again) but the presence of the virus during that month can't be established from that recently reported result. Edit: the specification of the IP2 and IP4 gene tests that gave result in March 2019 sample: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/real-time-rt-pcr-assays-for-the-detection-of-sars-cov-2-institut-pasteur-paris.pdf https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/real-ti...
  - 6y ago

jfoster 6y ago

No. Pandemics keep happening repeatedly and based on the past ~100 years, you'd be inclined to say that the frequency may be increasing: 1918, HIV, 1957, 1968, 2020. (and particularly so if you factor in the near-misses: SARS and MERS)

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

> You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk. Before this pandemic people wouldn't care. Now it's happen people like you are still trying to justify it away. Well, if you'd spoken to any epidemiologist (and I have) they'd have warned this was coming. It was inevitable. Before: "nah, it won't happen". Now: "well, you can say anything in retrospect". This is the superpower of human stupidity, it can dismiss anything inconvenient.

grey-area 6y ago
I'm not attempting to justify or defend the US or the Chinese pandemic response to Coronavirus (both of which were awful). I'm saying it was not utterly predictable in the course of its spread. The extent of the spread would have surprised most people, including epidemiologists if you asked them in January - precisely because we have encountered very similar viruses before and managed to contain them - it was always a possibility, but was considered by most of the world a remote one. Indeed, epidemiologists and governments in many countries knew about the virus in February, but not all reacted appropriately as they'd seen many such warnings before and for previous viruses it was contained and not a risk. There's swine flu in humans in multiple locations in China at the moment and it is likely to evolve to jump human to human - are you personally preparing for it to spread in the US now? If not why not since its spread is, like coronavirus, inevitable? Human stupidity also lends itself to retrospective reframing of events as inevitable and easily predictable when they are neither - it's easy to say everyone knew what was coming when talking in retrospect and very hard to accurately asses risk or probability.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  > I'm not attempting to justify or defend... That's irrelevant > The extent of the spread would have surprised most people... But not epidemiologists. > precisely because we have encountered very similar viruses before and managed to contain them Epidemiologists knew it was coming, and knew one would escape the net. They knew it. I spoke to several personally during when this happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic and I started to listen. They knew it. Don't pretend otherwise. > If not why not since its spread is, like coronavirus, inevitable? So first you claim it's unpredictable, then you acknowledge it's inevitable. Keep your eyes shut and everything's going to be alright.