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A contagious disease pandemic is not a black swan event. We have had many of them before and there are people whose day jobs are to model and plan for them.
by harvey9 1y ago
A contagious disease pandemic is not a black swan event. We have had many of them before and there are people whose day jobs are to model and plan for them.
- array_key_first 1y agoIt was the only such event in most people's lifetimes.
- jcranmer 1y agoWe've had, in this century, SARS, swine flu, MERS, ebola (× like 4), mpox (×2 apparently), Zika virus, and COVID-19. AIDS is a pandemic that's been going on since before I was born. Pandemics and pandemic scares are really friggin' common.
- monooso 1y agoSeveral of those were not pandemics (I assume this is why you used the phrase "pandemic scares" as a catch-all). Regardless of official classification, I don't recall any of them having anywhere near the same global impact as COVID.
- AlexandrB 1y agoHow many of those resulted in worldwide lockdowns, masking mandates, and widespread testing requirements for travel? I believe the answer is: 1. This is a very pedantic counter argument that leans on the fact that "pandemic" has too broad of a definition. There was nothing else like COVID in my (40 year) lifetime.
- jcranmer 1y agoHalf of them have, actually. The COVID response was heavily based off of the SARS response. The major difference with COVID is that it's the first time first world countries were asked to employ standard public health responses in many decades.
- ben_w 1y ago> The major difference with COVID is […] Those are, obviously to me as a different reader, the entire point.
- tempfile 1y agoThese are not mutually exclusive properties. Pandemic modellers do not predict exactly when a pandemic will emerge, they predict how a pandemic will evolve once it emerges. The actual emergence of a pandemic is still about as predictable as, say, a stock market crash or a war.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoThe virulence and adaptability of Covid makes it very much a black swan.
- harvey9 1y agoA black swan is something you didn't even imagine before encountering it. If you never imagined anything like COVID that's likely because your day job is unrelated to health emergency preparedness.
- anon191928 1y ago+ N. Taleb many time said covid is NOT a black swan. By definition.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 1y agoI've imagined things far worse than covid my friend. I write sci-fi and horror. Other people's "black swans" are my evening wind-down exercise. Just because I've seen some shit doesn't mean that when it tears through the world and it's new to y'all it won't be a black swan.
- Alive-in-2025 1y agoTrump fired many people whose job it was to plan for it. RFK Jr canceled vaccine research and various practices that will make it worse. I never imagined such idiocy on top of Trump's more likely racism policies. Future pandemics are much more likely now.
- ponector 1y agoThen almost anything is not a black swan by this logic. Russian invasion is not a black swan event, we had many of them before and there are people whose day job is to plan for them. Tsunami, earthquake are another examples. We had them before and there are plans for such events.