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Comment by barrenko | Hacker News Reader

It's NOT a black swan event.

Not the OP but we've last had a pandemic of such proportions 100 years ago, and back then the world was not as inter-connected and inter-dependent as it is right now. Even during WW1 and WW2 industry and the economy itself were working (sometimes at full capacity), a fact that it is not happening right now. We've never had half of the planet's population in some sort of lockdown, that is the definition of a "black sawn event".

Yeah, one could say that things could have been better prepared (I'm in that camp), but one can never truly prepare for half of the working population being put on indeterminate leave on such great a scale.

Black Swan events are unknown unknowns. White swan events are known unknowns. Pandemics are White Swan events.

So by your reasoning, a large asteroid discovered to hit earth a month from now would be a white swan event, because we always knew it could happen.

An asteroid is definitionally a Grey Swan. Very unlikely to happen, and of great impact, but still considered possible. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/grey-swan.asp

COVID-19s impact wasn't nearly unpredictable or unprecedented enough to be defined as a Black Swan imo. I did know many people both in real life and online who were concerned about it before the impact, considerably different from e.g. 2008 financial crisis.

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