Some people did. Taiwan prepared after SARS. Of course nobody forsaw all possible consequences but it would be better to say that not everyone has the capacity to account for all possible tail risks.
Few like to prepare for something that might happen, but nobody can tell you when. But as a private citizen or small to medium business, what you can do to prepare for an event of this scale and duration is also fairly limited. It has to happen at broader societal level.
to the dead comment, i agree! except i don't really see bernie being an ultra-borderline commie. but i guess that's how you would view someone when the entire "right" calls joe biden a socialist. man if only those labels were actually true of those people.
the entire us system is broken because there are basically only two parties, and the democrats have decided to keep pushing further right because they assume actual leftists will have to vote for them. so i don't really give a shit that you bag on them. they suck.
trump probably would have had the election in the bag if he didn't muck up the pandemic so badly. and that's not my opinion. the polls show it happening. now will trump get a big enough bounce coming back the other way come november? i don't see it, and neither does trump and the gop considering the ways they're trying to basically suppress the general vote. the democrats suck, but the gop are straight up using fascist tactics. he already tried to "suspend" the election so can't wait to see what happens when he loses and he decides that, no, he actually didn't lose. (again assuming polling is right, i guess we'll find out in 2.5 months)
We are lucky that we don’t have a U-shaped fatality curve like the spanish flu.
Also, states need testing regimes and plans in place to handle millions of tests per day.
tl;dr: We are learning a lot! Lack of preparedness is not a <5 year story.
You mean W-shaped. Regular flu is U-shapped. Covid is more of a ᜴
I wonder though if the events in the second half of march could be considered a black swan. Starting from mid-march, we saw first Europe, then a significant part of the world shut down most travel, large parts of its economy and almost all of its public life.
I remember the shift in the overton window to be particularly salient (from my pov in Germany):
Before March 15, the pandemic was one news story among many, even if a particularly worrying one. There were spirited public debates about whether travelers should go through temperature checks at airports and whether or not a city should take the unprecedenced step to chancel one particular trade fair. Some experts were proposing to close schools for a week or two and to conduct soccer games without audience - but those ideas seemed mostly academic and without any hope of becoming real policy.
Fast forward one week later and all trade fairs are canceled, as are any other kind of mass event; schools are closed indefinitely, borders are closed, global air travel comes to a full stop and the discussion of the day is whether or not to expect a nationwide, permanent curfew in the coming days.
The measures were clearly justified, but I have my doubts if anyone could have expected that countries actually pull through with this extreme kind of reaction.
People have also been warning about the next market crash for many years. Finally, one happened because of pandemic, and it's over in a blink of an eye.
I'm still expecting an even bigger crash, but I've learned my lesson against timing the future.
"We don't know when the next pandemic will come, but it will come, and we should be prepared for it" is a perfectly reasonable statement. Any pandemic is likely going to require PPE, PCR testing reagents, BSL labs, etc.
Same thing for recessions; predicting the specific timing of one is difficult. Advocating preparations for one - economic, fiscal, social policies etc. to mitigate, for example - is not a bad idea even if we don't know the timing.
Isn't California due for the big one. Should we be spending now to get everyone out before it hits.
Prepare? Absolutely. I can't speak to the state of California's earthquake preparedness, but there should absolutely be supplies and equipment stationed throughout the state in preparation for it. It is my understanding that San Francisco, for example, has water cisterns throughout the city for fighting fires in such a scenario.
It is dumb not to prepare for disasters we know will happen.
Why is disaster preparedness at all controversial?
Don't try to time the market. Do try to prepare for a crisis.
In all fairness, the US did actually think to create a preparedness strategy, it was just ignored when the time came.
In your market comparison, it would be like having a safety net of cash stashed in case of a market crash, and when the market crashes you spend it all immediately on a new car.
-Stephen Schwartz, on Twitter, May 2018
People knew. Also, Americans don't really have the habit of factoring in major events outside of their control into their long term strategy. It will be ok. The danger is "over there". The oceans will protect us.
Why is Bandar bin Sultan still free?
Why was information suppressed by congress concerning Bandar sending $130,000 to the two 9/11 hijackers? Why has the Bush family never been questioned about their close friendship with Bandar?
But I think so did every country.
Wasn't global pandemic at the top of almost every country's national security risk register? They knew it was likely, and they knew it was high-risk. I know for a fact it was at the top of the UK's public national security risk register.
You're perpetuating a silly myth that major western countries didn't know this was coming and didn't know it was a big risk.
Air travel increase is a big factor why it got so bad so quickly, even in the past two decades basically everything has changed. We have hundreds millions of people basically teleporting between continents every day.
That's hyperbole. In 2019 there were 4.5 billion passengers boarding a flight[1]. Divide by 365 days and you get on the order of 10 million per day, most of which will not be intercontinental.
I don't disagree about the amount of air travel nowadays facilitating pandemics, just wanted to get the numbers straight.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...
You’re implying as if wars happen because people are all angry and if they just happened to be kinder then all of that would be resolved immediately.
It’s discounting a bunch of pragmatic reasons a lot of which have nothing to do with philosophy or human condition.
>> and prepared for one happening eventually
Which is what you're doing - because the context of the thread is more specifically that anyone foresaw it - 'He couldn’t foresee that. No one did.' and the person I'm replied to that saying that they thought just some like Taiwan foresaw it.
Both are demonstrably false claims - you can look at public national security risk registers to confirm to yourself that many other countries foresaw it.
What else did they prepare for. Is this public knowledge?