
A Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-pandemic-coming
======
jv22222
People are focusing on the "he saw it coming" aspect of the title.

I would encourage folks to read the article with an open mind as the "he saw
it coming" is not really the point of most of what is said here.

This is is an expert who understands the realty of zoonotic spillover, and how
it is going to become a more prevalent threat over time, and how to deal with
that threat.

~~~
chrisseaton
> People are focusing on the "he saw it coming" aspect of the title.

Of course - because it's a silly title. Give an article a silly title, expect
silly comments.

~~~
sn9
Only if you hold people to the standard of engaging with an article on the
basis of its headline instead of its substance.

We should hold everyone to a higher standard than that.

(At the very least, if the headline isn't enough to get you to read the
article, avoid commenting on it.)

------
leto_ii
> I’m stunned by the absolute absence of global dialogue for what is a global
> event. In Europe right now, you would never believe that there was a
> European Union.

This is my key takeaway. A lot of the damage is in the end self-inflicted.
People seem not to be able to act cohesively at an inter-national scale, not
even within a country group that is supposedly designed for that.

Whether it's pandemics, global warming or nuclear weapons this lack of
cooperation shows up again and again.

~~~
kjakm
This is happening on the individual level too. The panic buying of items like
toilet roll + pasta in places the virus hasn't even taken hold yet is a stark
reminder of how utterly selfish some people can be. Sadly the people that will
end up with difficulties are the less selfish people who now can't get
essential items even when there is zero need for them to be scarce.

Edit: As an example: I would like one bottle of hand sanitiser. That should
last quite a while (nobody needs boxes and boxes of the stuff) and it would be
very useful. I cannot buy it anywhere either IRL or online. As a last resort I
just checked eBay. I found a 500ml approx bottle of Purrell for £17. Insane
but given it would be very useful to have I almost bought it. Then I noticed
the postage price was £100. The crazy part is that this person has sold quite
a few of these according to eBay. You can claim this is the free market and
supply/demand etc.etc. all you want but that doesn't make it ok. It's still
incredibly selfish behaviour.

Edit 2: Any explanation for the downvotes? I almost self-censored my comment
on the free market as I thought it might lead to downvotes - decided to go
ahead with it anyway. If you disagree with anything I've said starting a
discussion is much more productive than hiding something you don't like.

~~~
scrollaway
> _The panic buying of items like toilet roll + pasta in places the virus hasn
> 't even taken hold yet is a stark reminder of how utterly selfish some
> people can be._

I disagree… "before the virus has even taken hold" is the perfect time to do
long-term shopping. Avoiding crowded areas (read: THE MALL and the public
transports to get to the mall) is key to reducing infection.

Yes, hand sanitizer/face mask markets are ridiculous right now, but that's to
be expected. It's not people being selfish, there's clearly genuine needs for
it. When there's a fuckton of needs and not enough being produced… how is it
people being selfish that you can't find hand sanitizer at a decent price? All
those have been bought.

~~~
goblin89
If everyone buys only what they need (e.g., if it’s a small personal sanitizer
bottle, keep 1 in use and 1 in inventory), demand could be spread out and
crowds avoided.

The problem appears to combine habitual shopping for long term (not many have
a 24/7 convenience store within 3 minutes of walking), panicked distrust in
infrastructure reliability, and good old tragedy of the commons.

Some countries fare better on first two, but still have the last one (e.g.,
Hong Kong).

~~~
cortesoft
The thing is, normally most people done have ANY hand sanitizer, let alone
two, as you describe.... so when suddenly everyone wants to buy them, there
isn't enough for everyone to have even two. That doesn't make the people
buying them selfish.

~~~
sjtindell
But that’s not what they do, try to buy two or whatever reasonable number. A
few people literally fill a shopping cart with toilet paper, water bottles,
and hand sanitizer, and it’s gone. The problem is one of capacity to match
demand within such short time frames.

~~~
beatgammit
I went to Costco and saw people buying up to the limit on random stuff, and
they end up with 6 months of toilet paper, 1 year worth of pasta, etc. I
wanted one box of diapers (one lasts over a month), and there were only 4-5
boxes left when there's normally 20+, even when there's a good sale. I have
never seen them be out of baby wipes, but they were out when I went (which is
a shame because we just ran out). In fact, they had to shut down a local
Costco because people are fighting over toilet paper.

COVID-19 isn't going to be some world ending thing, it's just going to put
some supply pressure in the short term until production and distribution can
ramp back up, but people are treating it like it will be. It's really
frustrating.

~~~
ethbro
The base problem is that it's Prisoner's Dilemma.

If nobody hoards, everyone is fine.

If a small number of people hoard, there are stock-outs, and everyone else has
no access to the thing.

Ergo, the strictly dominant individual move is to hoard ASAP. As it provides
coverage against all scenarios.

Limiting quantities is the obvious equitable response to this, so it's been
good seeing retailers step up and do so.

~~~
goblin89
I believe the implicit assumption here is distrust in reliability of supply,
other people’s behavior and infrastructure in general. Some cultures are more
resistant to this kind of stuff.

------
sago
It is very tempting to be drawn into these kind of articles. But they are
always worth a little caution. Counting successful predictions post hoc is
dangerous.

If there had been no pandemic this year, but California had suffered from an
overwhelming earthquake, this article would read "A Wo/Man Who Saw the
Earthquake Coming." If a catastrophic series of diplomatic failures had led to
a nuclear strike: "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Nuclear War Coming." 20 years ago
there were plenty of "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Terror Attacks Coming."

And I'm not suggesting these people are crazy or out there on the fringe.
Experts working in an area might agree what a worst case situation is, but
disagree whether it is likely. If we took every worst case scenario entirely
seriously, we would do very little else.

Learning from the past is important. But estimating the probability of things
that have occurred is really difficult and counterintuitive.

~~~
muzani
If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and the
action would have been seen as an overreaction. There were at least two cases
during the Cold War which could have caused nuclear war, but some people made
the right call.

The article is focused more on future viruses. A bad thing happened now which
was preventable.

We've got no nuclear plant meltdowns and no nuclear wars, because we applied
security procedures learned from the past to the present. We have less killer
quakes because buildings are built to withstand earthquakes now.

Most of these things aren't totally expensive to fix. They're a chain of bad
events and all you have to do is break the chain at the weakest point. The
Spanish flu was so deadly because people tried to bury it with propaganda and
no quarantine measures were in place. At least today, we've panicked and taken
action early.

~~~
AmericanChopper
> If someone saw it coming, and acted early, there would be no pandemic and
> the action would have been seen as an overreaction

Preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate would come at the
opportunity cost of doing anything else at all.

~~~
muzani
We don't have to focus on _every_ crisis. The context here is zoonotic
spillover, which has killed millions of people historically, and it keeps
happening again and again.

It's still okay that we didn't listen to experts like this last time. But this
serves as a good wake up call. Avian flu didn't wake us. Swine flu didn't wake
us. We were distracted when Spanish Flu came around. But let's not have this
repeat too many times.

~~~
AmericanChopper
This line of reasoning is really just silly for a number of reasons.

For starters, preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate,
even for just a single category of crisis, would still come at the opportunity
cost of doing anything else at all.

Also, what’s so special about spillovers? People suffer and die from all sorts
of things every day.

Finally, what lessons do you expect people to learn from past spillover
events? To not have contact with any non-human organisms? Spillovers happen
all the time. Most human viruses come from other animals. Is it reasonable to
expect we can predict which infections, out of the millions of spillover
infections that occur ever year, are going to cause a crisis? Or predict when
a typically self-limiting spillover infection is going to unexpectedly pick up
a new transmission route? Or should all sickness be treated as if it were
ground zero for the next pandemic until proven otherwise?

------
thdrdt
He is not the only one.

I believe it was an Ask Me Anything with Bill Gates on Reddit.

Someone asked Gates about a third world war and he replied he was more sure
and worried about a pandemic.

I have no doubt others in the field had the same thoughts.

The most troubling thing is that a lot of leaders dismissed this information.

~~~
corpMaverick
He warned us. We didn't listen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI)

~~~
randomsearch
I think about a gazillion people identified exactly this type of situation as
a problem, and we’ve had plenty of other outbreaks. It is completely
unsurprising. The UK has done a lot of modelling and prepping for such an
event, as I’m sure have other governments, but that doesn’t give you magic
powers when it happens.

~~~
makomk
It's also worth bearing in mind that there's precisely one country which could
possibly have done what he suggested and stopped this by preventing the
spillover in the first place - China - and, well, good luck with that.

~~~
randomsearch
I think the problem is that the virus is so mild. You can't spot a lot of
cases, so e.g. someone gets on a plane and is not showing symptoms and a few
days later in Italy they get sick or infect others without realising they're
ill.

------
onetimemanytime
It's fair to say that a LOT of people saw it coming. Just in recent history
we've dealt with Ebola, MERS, SARS so that they are viruses looking to become
best buddies with us is not new, and it doesn't require a visionary to notice.

------
jokoon
If china allows those wet markets again I hope there will be international
efforts to sabotage those markets, and even have sanctions on china if they do
nothing to fight against those practices.

I've heard those farmers who breed those animals lobbied the chinese
government to allow those farms. So in the end, they will not prevent those
practices entirely. So it might happen again in a region where the government
have less control. That's the scary part.

It's eye-opening that unscientific beliefs are actually endangering lives. It
was true for anti-vax, but now we have reached a stage when ignorance reached
a new stage of dangerosity.

~~~
illumin8
It's more than wet markets, although those are obviously dangerous. It's the
continued expansion of human population into rainforests and other wildlife
areas:

> Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported
> outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re
> looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than
> what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge
> increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The
> single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land
> going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.

This is not going to be fixed easily. Everything from the deforestation of the
Brazilian rainforest to Chinese population growth is driving it.

------
Phenomenit
I think the most important part in the article is that with the wave of
populism and nationalism sweeping the world it's evident that this mindset is
incapable of solving any real problem on any scale. Even if the virus goes
away and the economy bounces back we've learned nothing and climate change and
another wave of pandemics is upon us.

It's clear that market capitalism isn't resilient or robust. Our engine must
always run on red and sooner or later it's going to brake down.

~~~
erpellan
A car has brakes. An engine breaks down.

Apart from that I agree. We forgot the ‘enlightened’ self interest part of
capitalism. My wealth means nothing if the planet has to die for me to get it.

~~~
DagAgren
The "enlightened" part was never there. That was always just self-
justification.

------
tomerbd
"Viruses live on a delicate balance, don’t they? They have to be able to
thrive without killing their host.

Right. The ones that kill off their host quickly will disappear. With the SARS
virus, it’s no surprise that killing 10 percent of its host, it wasn’t able to
establish itself as a pandemic virus on this planet."

~~~
bryanrasmussen
a virus could kill 100% of its host, as long as it took a long time to do so
while the host was still able to go around and infect others.

I don't think the 10% virulence is the reason (or the only reason) that SARS
didn't make it to pandemic scale, I think it was everyone working against it
and succeeding that time, which of course had the result of people thinking
"hah, see it wasn't a problem, all those eggheads overreacting"

on edit: I think my main irritation is with the governments that did not put
the proper preparation in the health systems (enough ICU preparation for
example) for what was a foreseeable event.

~~~
TsomArp
If you kill 100% of your hosts, to which other host will you go? 100% means
all.

~~~
amiga_500
Surely aids falls into this category

------
pfdietz
I wonder if the end result of informing people that wildlife is swimming in
potentially deadly viruses would be the attitude that the wildlife should be
exterminated, not preserved.

------
zaat
I submitted an article predicting Corona virus pandemic from 2013, but it
wasn't upvoted:

The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22571607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22571607)

~~~
jimbobimbo
I recon it didn't receive attention, because it's a trite observation, not
prediction.

"It's not if, but when there will be another recession."

"It's not if, but when there will be another pandemic."

"It's not if, but when another asteroid hit the Earth."

We live in the real world, things happen more than once.

~~~
zaat
Yes, that's the headline. But the article is specifically about Corona and
quite detailed:

> Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and
> gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans,
> other mammals and birds.

...

> Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very
> protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for
> recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is
> continually being inaccurately copied — and when two virus strains infect a
> single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives
> them what one expert has called an “intrinsic evolvability,” a capacity to
> adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts.

...

> Bats, though wondrous and necessary animals, do seem to be
> disproportionately implicated as reservoir hosts of new zoonotic viruses...

------
keithnz
from what I've seen, lots of people in many different countries saw it coming.

~~~
whatshisface
The three major groups of saw it coming are the "saw it coming from China"
which only the most rational and steady-minded people were able to achieve,
the "saw it coming once it spread to Italy" people (I fell in to this group
because I fell prey to the "China is a different planet" fallacy), and the
group you have a chance of joining today, the "realized American hospitals
were going to get overwhelmed after seeing it happen in two other countries"
group.

~~~
danieltillett
Plenty of us saw this coming as soon as news came out of China - even me [0].
The problem was none of us were able to do anything about it, either on a
social or individual level beyond stocking up on food and other essentials in
January before the masses panicked.

0\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156140)

~~~
blhack
It's been a very difficult, helpless feeling watching this all happen. A lot
of people were watching from afar what occurred in Wuhan, then saw it spread
to SK, Japan, and eventually Italy. When Disney and Starbucks shut down in
China it was extremely concerning, and when FoxConn shut down it was
terrifying.

I've been telling my friends and family that they should be gathering extra
food, medications, etc. if for no reason other than the coming supply chain
disruptions. At first they laughed, but at this point they seem like they're
actually mad at me, and in some senses _blame_ me for the currently bare
shelves in supermarkets. It sucks.

~~~
danieltillett
The feeling I have is like being tied to the railway line and watching the
train coming around the bend.

Nobody has started to blame me for the situation, but plenty laughed at me at
the time when I tried to warn them what is coming. They have stopped laughing.

~~~
skinkestek
The problem is probably that they lumped you up with all the doomsday
predictors.

I have a certain friend who, for years, have been trying to tell everyone that
normal food is bad and imported "superfoods" are the way to go.

Same goes for scaremongering of every other kind. I feel for everyone who
warned about the corona virus in January there are 5 or 10 who warned about
everything else which turns out to be a significantly smaller problem.

------
cageface
_They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of
spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier.
That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human
population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor
of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more
specifically to livestock production._

 _It was avian influenza in the 2000s. What you saw with avian influenza was a
direct consequence of how much poultry was being produced to feed people_

So meat eating is not only a big driver in climate change and antibiotic
resistance but is also dramatically increasing the likelihood of these
crossover pandemics. It's time for us to quit our toxic addiction to meat.

~~~
rmdashrfstar
How does one do so without missing essential nutrients that are only found in
meats, if we're requiring realistic quantities for daily consumption, and not
an absurd volume of food.

For instance, there are certain things you find in large quantities in meat or
fish, where the non meat aubsistute would require completely unrealistic
amounts to be consumed to receive anywhere near the same amount.

If this could be concretely addressed, I think that'd convince a lot of people
on the fence to switch.

~~~
cageface
The only nutrient that can not be found in plants is B12 which is easily
supplemented. The official position of the American Dietetics Association is
that diets completely free of animal products are _healthful, nutritionally
adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of
certain diseases_ :

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704)

We're killing ourselves and the planet just because we like the way animals
taste.

~~~
hyperdunc
We are not killing the planet, but we are putting ecosystems under pressure.

And evolution has given us tastes for things that are highly nutritious but
were difficult to come by. Shall we deny ourselves these pleasures because
they become problematic at scale? If so, what else should we ban by the same
logic?

Perhaps the main problem is that there are too many of us. Or maybe we should
be putting more effort into growing meat in vats.

Whatever we end up doing, I doubt it'll end in some kind of sustainable
balance. Rather, we'll continue to multiply and consume as much as our
technology allows and the environment can bare.

~~~
uxcolumbo
Have you tried eating raw pig or cow meat?

What gives meat the taste are the spices and the way we prepare it.

We now have great plant based alternatives (Impossible Food, Beyond Meat, and
more coming on the market) that are getting better and better and which are
less harmful to our biosphere. But even without those alternatives, there are
so many great dishes that don't require meat and they are delicious and
nutritious. Just have to have an open mind and explore what's out there.

RE: Shall we deny ourselves these pleasures because they become problematic at
scale?

There are so many studies (some of which I posted further above). Science
confirms that our current way of life is not sustainable.

So what is more important?

A) That we don't put our ecosystem under immense pressure as we are doing now

B) The pleasure you derive from eating chopped up animals

EDIT: formatting / typos

------
tus88
No more batfish soup for you!

------
DaniFong
I started running at this full tilt on Jan 23rd, for the record. Making
progress. The main problem was our information systems were taken over, but I
fuxxed it pretty good I think. It was all about making the positive feedbacks.

------
peignoir
Great interview until he talks about the slowly boiling frog analogy :
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)
it’s stupid but he lost his credibility for me there ...

~~~
anoncow
I think he meant it metaphorically.

~~~
hencq
Obviously. He even calls it an old saw. That's a very strange reason to be put
off from the article.

------
blackrock
I think the appearance of this virus, was only a matter of time. It’s not a
question of if, but, when.

The virus had existed in bats for millions of years, evolving and stabilizing
itself symbiotically with the bat, and it took just the right combination, the
right spark, to set off a chain of events that would allow it to eventually
hunt down the human race.

------
forkexec
End all meat agriculture and urban sprawl globally, and the risks of
developing novel pandemics would fall precipitously. They are the major
sources and they are entirely deliberately chosen.

