> First, we should stop trying to predict or even attach probabilities to disasters. From earthquakes to wars to financial crises, the major disruptions in history have been characterized by random or power-law distributions. They belong in the domain of uncertainty, not risk. It is better to admit that than to delude ourselves with unattainable and probably misleading precision.
This paragraphs sums up this article for me. Lots of incoherent finger pointing. "We should do better but let's not delude ourselves that we can". In the one paragraph above he prescribes a model for occurence while telling us it's pointless.
This was the main part I found interesting:
> Not coincidentally, the places that did best in 2020 included three — Taiwan, South Korea and (despite a serious summer setback) Israel — that face multiple threats, including existential threats from neighbors.
So preparedness is a societal mindset. How frequently does a country need to be threatened to maintain this? How long does this mindset last after a threat? How much does preparedness cost a society? I'd have liked him to talk more about these kinds of things.
I've always wondered this since COVID hit. Why has this not happened more frequently? If it were a natural event, why are we not constantly being bombarded with these things? And what happens when we get 3, 4, 5 different ones at once?
I'm no conspiracy theorist. But Occam's Razor leans heavily to the side of COVID being a man made catastrophe when you think about that.
The most likely origin of this virus at this point, was an accidental lab leak due to a quirk in regulations where BSL 2 was the category approved for normal coronaviruses, and BSL 3 was reserved for the natural strains that already infected humans like SARS 1 and MERS.
Unfortunately nobody in the lab bothered to question whether they should be using BSL 3 gear when they were breeding bat born Corona viruses with humanized mice.
That's the most likely explanation:
This doesn't happen too frequently because normally somebody has the brains to ask themselves if the virus they are creating requires a greater level of protective gear than what the rules call for.
For anyone that questions this comment and thinks that I'm some lunatic pushing conspiracy theories feel free to look at the NIH grant that funded this research and noticed the specific phrase of humanized mice.
Bear in mind that in the early 2000s it only took 4 months to find the intermediate host between bats and humans. For mers it took 9 months to identify camels as the intermediate host.
Despite having orders of magnitude more funding nobody has found an intermediate animal host for covid-19. Common sense tells you there was an intermediate host and it was the humanized mice in the laboratory.
Occam's Razor thinks you might want to go to a library and read about power law distributions.
We do have continual events. Most are extremely localized and small. Some reach the "local intervention" stage. A tiny percentage of those reaches the "newspapers elsewhere write about it stage". Occasionally, you get regional crises (SARS/MERS, for example). We finally got a global one.
And yes, there are simultaneous outbreaks. All the time. We had, during the middle of Covid, several Ebola outbreaks in Africa. There was likely a large number of avian flu events that just didn't affect people because it was lost in the noise.
COVID had some some circunstances that helped becoming so widespread.
It takes several days for someone to caught it to develop symptoms, if ever.
It happened at a moment in time and place with very high connectivity with the rest of the world
You have far less odds of having severe symptoms (specially in the main/original variants), if any, if you are young enough. That is a good age for international travel (and spreading) and to not not care about consequences for others.
And, last but not least, the influence of social networks and agents on them, that denied that the disease was a risk, that people should not take measures, and now that you should not vaccinate. And conspiracy theories, of course.
He basically lets the Trump administration off the hook but blames public health bureaucracy of California - typical of what I've come to expect from Niall Ferguson, a partisan hack at this point.
> He basically lets the Trump administration off the hook
That's pretty loaded.
Should we let the entire liberal political establishment off the hook for screaming at the top of their lungs that Trump is evil for not going gung-ho with a WWII mobilization for ventilators? Only to later find that ventilators in many cases were not only ineffective, but leading to death.
renjimen|4 years ago
This paragraphs sums up this article for me. Lots of incoherent finger pointing. "We should do better but let's not delude ourselves that we can". In the one paragraph above he prescribes a model for occurence while telling us it's pointless.
This was the main part I found interesting:
> Not coincidentally, the places that did best in 2020 included three — Taiwan, South Korea and (despite a serious summer setback) Israel — that face multiple threats, including existential threats from neighbors.
So preparedness is a societal mindset. How frequently does a country need to be threatened to maintain this? How long does this mindset last after a threat? How much does preparedness cost a society? I'd have liked him to talk more about these kinds of things.
aphextron|4 years ago
I'm no conspiracy theorist. But Occam's Razor leans heavily to the side of COVID being a man made catastrophe when you think about that.
JPKab|4 years ago
The most likely origin of this virus at this point, was an accidental lab leak due to a quirk in regulations where BSL 2 was the category approved for normal coronaviruses, and BSL 3 was reserved for the natural strains that already infected humans like SARS 1 and MERS.
Unfortunately nobody in the lab bothered to question whether they should be using BSL 3 gear when they were breeding bat born Corona viruses with humanized mice.
That's the most likely explanation: This doesn't happen too frequently because normally somebody has the brains to ask themselves if the virus they are creating requires a greater level of protective gear than what the rules call for.
For anyone that questions this comment and thinks that I'm some lunatic pushing conspiracy theories feel free to look at the NIH grant that funded this research and noticed the specific phrase of humanized mice.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
Bear in mind that in the early 2000s it only took 4 months to find the intermediate host between bats and humans. For mers it took 9 months to identify camels as the intermediate host.
Despite having orders of magnitude more funding nobody has found an intermediate animal host for covid-19. Common sense tells you there was an intermediate host and it was the humanized mice in the laboratory.
groby_b|4 years ago
We do have continual events. Most are extremely localized and small. Some reach the "local intervention" stage. A tiny percentage of those reaches the "newspapers elsewhere write about it stage". Occasionally, you get regional crises (SARS/MERS, for example). We finally got a global one.
And yes, there are simultaneous outbreaks. All the time. We had, during the middle of Covid, several Ebola outbreaks in Africa. There was likely a large number of avian flu events that just didn't affect people because it was lost in the noise.
gmuslera|4 years ago
It takes several days for someone to caught it to develop symptoms, if ever.
It happened at a moment in time and place with very high connectivity with the rest of the world
You have far less odds of having severe symptoms (specially in the main/original variants), if any, if you are young enough. That is a good age for international travel (and spreading) and to not not care about consequences for others.
And, last but not least, the influence of social networks and agents on them, that denied that the disease was a risk, that people should not take measures, and now that you should not vaccinate. And conspiracy theories, of course.
okareaman|4 years ago
whipaway|4 years ago
That's pretty loaded.
Should we let the entire liberal political establishment off the hook for screaming at the top of their lungs that Trump is evil for not going gung-ho with a WWII mobilization for ventilators? Only to later find that ventilators in many cases were not only ineffective, but leading to death.
frankbreetz|4 years ago
>>The line of least intellectual resistance has been to blame populist leaders such as U.S. President Donald Trump.
How does this make sense?
rjsw|4 years ago
It doesn't need to make sense, Ferguson is just trying to defend other members of his team.