Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics | Hacker News Reader

Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics

theguardian.com

61 pointstangental15 comments

There is a real question here about whether we can sustain the sort of sprawling, interconnected, JIT supply chain that has been set up in the last 20 years and also whether our international travel patterns are sustainable.

The speed with which COVID-19 got to pretty much everywhere is stunning. If the death rate was more in line with, eg, the Black Death it would be interesting to see what happened to food & other supplies in the major cities.

Hopefully there is some principle that a virus can't jump between species that is both infectious, deadly and slow to show symptoms after becoming infectious.

For bacteria, antibiotic resistance is a big deal and aggravated by routine oversubscribing and meat agriculture. We need more antibiotics and phages quickly.

For fungi and yeast, there aren't enough antimycotics and they too are overused. We need more antimycotics and phages quickly also.

For viruses, meat agriculture, forest destruction and urban sprawl are contributory factors leading to faster mutations and jumping species eventually into us. It would be nice to have a mostly automated vaccine development lab system that can assemble and test thousands of compounds simultaneously.

>For viruses, meat agriculture, forest destruction and urban sprawl are contributory factors leading to faster mutations and jumping species eventually into us.

At this point you have to acknowledge that cultural factors are responsible for the majority of modern outbreaks. We know about the meat markets in China. They are as endemic as the viruses to the various animals they eat. No other country on Earth has originated this many animal to human outbreaks.

This is not an environmental issue.

> No other country on Earth has originated this many animal to human outbreaks.

I am ignorant, what is the data here? Which animal-to-human outbreaks are we counting?

The top animal-derived epidemics I can think of would be: SARS and 2019-nCoV from china, H1N1 had mixed heritage, MERS seemed to come from the middle east, Ebola and HIV from africa. So, pretty spread out?

Also, China is substantially larger than everything else but India, so wouldn't this be an expected outcome anyway?

For decades it's been reported in the US press that the seasonal flu outbreak comes from small farms raising pigs in rural China.

So start by googling that for each year.

In 2010, my home of Christchurch has a serious earthquake.

In 2011, it suffered another far more serious earthquake.

The 1st one provided a full dress rehearsal for the 2nd one.

I wonder of the same will be said for pandemics?

Coronavirus is by no means a dystopian apocalypse.

But it could be an opportunity to help us learn to prevent one.

My concern is around the cost benefit analysis from the perspective of elected leadership.

Prevention doesn’t pay politically.

> I wonder of the same will be said for pandemics?

It does.

Hong Kong experienced SARS in 2003. The pandemics hit the city hardly [1], infected almost 2000, taking a hundred lives, of which several are medical practitioners.

This time Hong Kong citizens sounded alarm as early as mid-December. They advocated locking down the border from Mainlanders in mid January [2]. The dysfunctional Government was completely oblivious to the situation until at least mid Feb. But the people with vivid memory of SARS took the situation seriously. Mask were used almost ubiquitously in late Jan. Hand sanitizers are equipped by everyone.

It is a stark contrast compared with expat or new mainland immigrants.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%9304_SARS_outbreak#...

2. The dates are recalled from memory, from conversation with HK friends. So take the dates with handful of salt

I’d like to see some defense budget diverted to create a bigger surplus of availability of other resources, like medical infrastructure. Give hospitals a double tax write off for empty beds, or some other clever incentive to ensure that they don’t try to run at exactly capacity all the time.

This is why it's so important that we do everything in our power to achieve a "societal backup" by expanding to at least one more planet.

At a grander level, this is what Elon Musk, SpaceX, and other related endeavors are all about.

Humans are terrible at considering and planning for large-scale, exponential, and extinction-level events ala pandemics, nuclear holocaust, and the long term effects of climate change.

The only real way to ensure that we don't drive ourselves extinct as a society (either purposefully or accidentally) is to create a backup copy of society, just like you would do for any other extremely valuable piece of information.

Onward to Mars!

Making a reasonable-sized, sustainable colony on Mars would arguably be significantly more work than considering and planning for "large-scale, exponential, and extinction-level events".

I generally agree, but a self-sustaining moon colony is far more practical, assuming water can be found there:

1. plenty of solar power

2. close to earth

3. easy to launch out of its gravity well

4. lunar base technology can be iterated far more rapidly

Regardless where you put your colony to, if you keep up a transportation system to that colony and back, you end up enabling spread of the disease. Coronavirus only spread so quickly because of airplane travel. Had we cancelled all airplane, train and ship traffic to and from China early enough, the virus wouldn't have spread as quickly. If in the future we have an intergalactic society with FTL travel, and one colony discovers an ancient virus that kills everyone, the virus will spread with speeds faster than light, because that's our underlying travel method.

To meet threats like coronavirus, you don't need a different planet. Any remote island would do, like easter island, as long as you shut down traffic soon enough.

New transportation keeps reducing the time delays for trips, but if you’re talking other planets, how fast do you think we can get? I expect a lull.

Of course if panspermia turns out to be true, we could discover some new branch of life that medicine or mammalian immune systems struggle to identify, but which likes to chew on bones or collagen, turning us all into jello.

Elon Musk's endeavors are more about vanity, I think. I found all the twitter antics to be quite odd for someone in his position.

There is no point in having a "backup copy" of society when we're dead. Colonizing Mars would only help the tiny minority that lives there. All efforts are better spent here on Earth.

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