
The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System - fortran77
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system
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tathougies
A fragile global system in which during a pandemic, people are still fed and
clothed? It's actually a testament to the modern economy that the pandemic
hasn't resulted in immediate shortages for basic sundry goods. The few
shortages we are seeing are for highly specialized medical equipment (N95
masks are not simple cloth covers).

I don't understand this mentality of pretending that our 'system' is somehow
inferior to the past. Previous pandemics resulted in mass death not only from
the disease but also from the economic fallout. We're really not seeing this
right now. Perhaps we will in the future. But we can't write articles on what
we want to happen to sell more news.

~~~
kiba
_A fragile global system in which during a pandemic, people are still fed and
clothed? It 's actually a testament to the modern economy that the pandemic
hasn't resulted in immediate shortages for basic sundry goods. The few
shortages we are seeing are for highly specialized medical equipment (N95
masks are not simple cloth covers)._

Because largely, nothing of our capital goods are being destroyed. Most humans
are still alive, and we can employ the manpower to run the equipment to ensure
we are fed if it comes to that.

 _A fragile global system in which during a pandemic, people are still fed and
clothed? It 's actually a testament to the modern economy that the pandemic
hasn't resulted in immediate shortages for basic sundry goods. The few
shortages we are seeing are for highly specialized medical equipment (N95
masks are not simple cloth covers)._

There's certainly weakness in our system.

Basically, preparing for a pandemic look like waste to us. It's equipment and
goods that aren't be used to satisfy the needs of people.

We are fragile because we rather buy cheap mask from oversea rather than
making sure that our mask production industries have enough what it needs to
produce masks in the quantities we need. And we are fragile because pandemics
preps have no advocates when it come to government downsizing. And because we
don't have a pandemic as deadly COVID-19, we don't war games to find weak sots
and spend even more money to fix our weakness.

And all weakness that are fixed are never going to matter until we hit an
especially deadly pandemic.

It's like a race car versus a normal car. A normal car, people likes
reliability. They don't care about getting from point A to point B fast as
possible. They don't care about the extra mass that keep them alive impacting
the fuel economy some amount. While the ideal race car is the car that break
apart at the finishing line, with engineering margins shaved until the edge of
failure.

~~~
lowdose
I think this virus has been a good test run and now we can put the procedures
in place to save us from a real pandemic treat in the future.

Can't imagine the WHO is going to be caught in a second amateur hour with
similar embarrassing proportions.

~~~
dangus
> Can't imagine the WHO is going to be caught in a second amateur hour with
> similar embarrassing proportions.

I can imagine it, especially when a certain someone is trying to defund them
to shift blame.

~~~
lowdose
The special treatment the WHO gave to China and the execution of their primary
task was clearly all pointing to a lost of their objectivity as an
institution.

Trump is right to stop the funding in order to prevent more moral hazard.
Don't hate the player but the game. In politics scapegoating is the daily
bread & butter, the only difference is the media tries to create an outrage
about Trump while if Obama did the New York Times would have helped him with
the optics.

------
haltingproblem
Mind-boggling that they are intellectual but idiots (IYI's in Taleb's
terminology) still making the "but car accidents kill more people and we don't
shutdown" argument.

Car accidents are not contagious and multiplicative. This simple point bears
repeating and explanation. If I get in a car accident and then go home there
is almost zero risk of me starting a contagion of multiple car accidents among
my family, co-workers and community. Just repeat this over and over again to
folks. Car accidents are not contagious and multiplicative. Car accidents are
not contagious and multiplicative. Car accidents are not contagious and
multiplicative.

"The common flu is as ..." argument. Common flu is contagious and
multiplicative but nowhere near as fatal. We are looking at 60,000+ covid-19
deaths with a near shutdown across the US. That death toll is near the high-
end of a bad flu season. Just imagine what it would look like with business as
usual.

~~~
op03
Go and check the recovery rate graph. Whats happening there? Is it
multiplicative?

~~~
haltingproblem
I think the term multiplicative threw you off. It simply means that the R0 >
1\. So a virus is contagious and will spread to increasing numbers of people
in the population.

Contrast that with the R0 of a car accident. We can reasonably say it is close
to zero or some might even say negative ;)

~~~
op03
R0 is not static. It will come down as more social distancing/mask wearing -
hospital/nursing processes improve day by day.

Just remember the initial months numbers you base your projection on is not
todays reality. No one was taking things seriously back then. Many deaths were
because hospitals had no plan to handle overload.

Today even Trumpers who are protesting for reboot are wearing masks. Things
change. Hospitals and nursing homes are much better prepared.

Most importantly just tracking covid deaths and forgetting about everything
else leads to a Focusing Illusion -
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-
missing-deaths.html)

Look at Sweden in the table provided why do they have the least Excess Deaths
even though they are following a different strategy?

