A Global Pandemic is NOT A BLACK SWAN. As matter of FACT, it was predicted by Taleb and according to him it is a WHITE SWAN.
The true problem here is the so called Risk "experts" do not understand Risk, and that is the core problem.
The true problem here is the so called Risk "experts" do not understand Risk, and that is the core problem.
Prominent people call this a black swan just to deflect responsibility, and perhaps to get a bit of bailout money on the side.
Yes respirators and masks, I know, but the previous administration had gone through the same thing on a smaller scale and stockpiles were not replenished possibly because experts said it won't happen again for a while (I am giving the previous administration the benefit of the doubt here.. I don't know why they didn't replace those items).
The point here is, there's not that much that even had all information been available, and masks, and respirators, the world could have done. It's literally a force of nature that humans have a limited ability to deal with instantly.
I am not defending any political or public policy department past or present. I am just stating the obvious. Everything else is 20/20 hindsight aimed at the margins of effectiveness, so why go there ?
even ... c.f. California.
These are all jurisdictions that took early, effective, widespread action that have resulted in dramatically lower rates of cases and deaths.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-cases-traject...
If you look at who has the LEAST per million (absolute number of cases are worse than useless and what most statisitic sites are showing) it's not nations usually associated with good governance, ahem...
So what's going on.
It's traffic. Flights into a nation, and especially flights from China. The nations with the best per capita numbers are low-air-traffic nations, per capita, so Belize, South Africa, Thailand, Andorra places like that.
So mystery solved. The difference between the US and Germany, the best of the "developed" nations, is not that big at all. For a long time, weeks and weeks, it's been mid 700s for BOTH nations. I am not sure where the very latest data is getting we're at 100 per million now, but still they're comparable in the larger scheme of things.
The virus started in China. The virus spread from China because of of the Communist Chinese Party's denial and lack of response.
Those are, in turn intimately connected to the fact that China is a one-party dictatorship that murdered the doctors who first tried to bring their attention to COVID-19 in the early days of the virus, lest the world forget.
Currently, Chinese epidemological numbers cannot be trusted because the Chinese Communist Party, on top of being a murderer of its own truth-telling scientists, is a pathological liar and manipulator of information, like all Communist regimes.
That's all I said about China; maybe someone said something more, so talk to them.
How many people die, the death rate from COVID-19, is about the same in most nations and mostly a function of age and previously existing health issues.
Aside from these facts, I don't even know what in my post you could be reacting to.
I was looking at a chart of the trajectory of the epidemic in different countries, and it was interesting because there were at least three qualitatively different types of curves.
South Korea and China are notable for nearly completely flattening out after a certain point. The former might tend to undermine conspiracy theories about China, I don't know. On the other hand, why have no other countries had the same experience? Could it be the response, or characteristics of data gathering and reporting?
Japan and Singapore have risen much more slowly than the US and hard-hit European countries, but do not seem to be flattening which is surprising and seems ominous.
The western countries that have a lot of cases seem to have a characteristic sort of gradual curve, that rose faster early on, gradually is leveling out, but not completely (yet). The US looks similar to the others, except it is larger and continuing to suggest a higher peak.
I am wondering if Japan, and maybe the US states that are not initially seeing a lot of cases, will end up being a second wave after things seem to be under control in a lot of places.
Without supporting an alternative theory, this sounds doubtful to me. Do you think, for instance, that the difference between West Virginia and New York is a result of the superior containment measures in the former? WV has a lower death rate so far than even South Korea.
There have been much more serious pandemics in the past, way too many to even list here. I'll briefly mention two because we know them well in the western canon -- the 1918 flu epidemic and the black death.
Everybody forgets that part (which sort of proves the point, eh?)
The problem isn’t risk experts; the problem is that government representatives elected have no domain expertise nor leadership fortitude to put domain experts into the driver’s seat when the situation dictates.
China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians.
Can we please stop parroting that distortion of the facts?
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/dems-misconstrue-trump-bud...
> China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STEM and less lawyers and politicians.
You don't know anything about China's leadership. They're all politicians. Not a decision gets made without it being vetted ideologically -- ideology always comes first. And we should look at the timelines from China before saying they "got it right."[1]
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devas...
I'm not a fan of fact-checker battles but Snopes says "Claim: The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs. True."
One would think reading only the Snopes article, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired.
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council (not CDC, contrary to what toomuchtodo claims) hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
PPS - Trump was not acquitted in the Senate until February 5. Thought experiment: What do you think would have happened if he had implemented the only thing that would have 100% kept COVID19 out of the US, completely shut down all borders (including with Canada) before January 15, the day "patient zero" entered Seattle from Wuhan? (The WHO was still stating that person-to-person contact for COVID19 did not seem to be occurring.)
Further, the entire culture he created — don’t speak truth to power, or you will be fired - is also responsible for the late actions and poor preparedness of the administration.
Furthermore, I seriously doubt that there is anything close to a “populist” war on expertise. The US public has had a somewhat adversarial relationship with Science throughout its history (possibly because College is not considered mandatory, but that’s me speculating). The lack of education and the unrelenting advertisement infrastructure around climate denial is probably what has painted scientists especially in a bad light.
Um, what? Look no further than the manufactured controversy over climate science, or evolution.
That's not getting it right, it's a different type of shit show.
My point is that they reacted the second half of January, after trying to cover up the outbreak for weeks/months. If the local and regional officials had acted effectively in late December, there might not be a global pandemic.
Although given a long enough timeline a pandemic is all but guaranteed, on a annual or election cycle it scores pretty low on the probability scale. Our gauge of the severity may have been misrepresented due to the once-in-a-century nature of this event.
Juxtapose that with issues that people face in the immediate term like budget shortfalls, service disruptions creating disgruntled electorates, etc. I think it's easy for powers-to-be to convince themselves to gut preparations for a pandemic in favor of more 'guaranteed-to-happen' short term crises. Combining poor risk assessments with a recency bias can incentivize these kinds of decisions.