Why do people say Covid was a black swan event? It was not, it was utterly predictable, if not the specific virus, then at least the course of its spread. The black swan is our collective ineptitude in handling the crisis, not the virus itself.
We’ve had pandemics repeatedly throughout recorded history and before. It’s not as though the world went “a virus what is this we’ve never seen anything like it”.
The black plague, the flu of 1918, and numerous other examples of epidemic diseases have struck down multitudes over thousands of years. Even Sars was just a score of years ago.
We were simply inept when it came to Covid-19. We dropped the ball. The thing about Covid isn’t how unexpected it was, it’s how utterly predictable it has been at every single turn.
Imagine there's a society at the bottom of a valley. Every 10 years, there's a flood which means everyone will have to move to the mountains for 3 months and eat stored food. So the wise old men make a flood council, to be populated with responsible people who ensure there's huts in the mountains and plenty of food.
Except it doesn't flood like a clockwork every 10 years. It's more like an annual dice roll. It can happen more often, but it can also happen less often. It's entirely within the scope of probability that kids are born and grow to be adults without a flood.
After a three decades, what has happened?
Someone will have the brilliant idea of using the spare food. Initially it will seem necessary, as hard times have arrived due to other circumstances. Eventually, people forget about filling it up.
Someone else will decide the flood huts are a waste, a bunch of empty homes with great views that nobody ever lives in. Why not sell it?
The flood council's work becomes undermined by their cost. People see there's all these highly educated people working on a plan that nobody's ever used. They see fat cats flying around to flood conferences, big flood taking a tax on everyone, and fearmongering whenever the flood council reminds people to be prepared.
So the flood eventually happens, people are drowned and the survivors starve.
One of the benefits of a state is that it does not need to operate like a business. It can and should maintain these refuges and keep them stocked. Perishables get replaced and consumed in the valley. A state has the ability to stand above current whims.
At the very least, contingency plans don’t go stale.
The second aspect is us facing the pandemic. Playing it down, calling it a hoax, refusing to wear a mask. Stomping around with guns. Making it a partisan issue. War rhetoric. It’s utterly insane. A few calm generations in the flood valley don’t quite explain this.
> At the very least, contingency plans don’t go stale.
They do if not maintained, especially when there are major changes in population size or spatial distribution, or changes in the infrastructure and its usage (e.g. hospital spinups and closures, traffic/transport).
To make it worse, Trump outright gutted the pandemic response team, and Germany hasn't done well in that regard either although we were quick to listen on experts, which mitigated that at least a bit.
> A few calm generations in the flood valley don’t quite explain this.
They do, actually. In the US, but also in parts of the EU, "science denial" has been moved from "whacko nutjob" territory to outright mainstream, with constant cuts in education funding doing the rest. Democracy requires a demos, especially a demos able (both intellectually and in terms of time) and willing to participate in the democratic process, to work.
That last word is the problem: there are many people, without a drop of sarcasm, irony, or smiling, who think government should indeed be run like a business.
A public information campaign on why that’s not the case certainly seems important to greatly reduce this idea’s popularity. Are there any groups doing this?
And even when the flood is actually occurring, people will shout it down as a hoax, or argue that any countermeasures have been a massive overreaction because only x people have drowned so far.
Any scientific work that produces an uncomfortable prediction will be written off as doom-mongering and any proposal that would impact people's personal comfort level will be declared as unworkable and unreasonable.
Imagine there are two societies like this. One invests in building huts and storing food, the other one doesn't. They don't have to maintain the food storage and huts. The labor is spent on something else that advances society. Let's say this gives them a 1% advantage in advancing society every year. After 100 years the 1% advantage turns into 1.001^100 = 2.7. The society that didn't invest in the disaster plan advanced much more.
When you tie up your resources you can't invest it into something else. Governments know this very well. That's why they borrow money to invest it into projects that will have a higher payoff than the interest.
At some point in disaster planning you need to ask what the impact of the preparation is vs the impact of the disaster itself. Obviously officials can't say after a disaster that the reason they didn't prepare was that they calculated that the cost to prepare was higher than the likelihood of the disaster times the cost of the disaster. If the officials admitted that then they would seem heartless. They say instead: "There was no way to see it coming."
If you think this line of thinking by officials is unreasonable, then I'd like to ask you: do you have a bomb shelter at home? Why not? The Swiss do: [0]
>"Every inhabitant must have a protected place that can be reached quickly from his place of residence".
>"Apartment block owners are required to construct and fit out shelters in all new dwellings".
>(Articles 45 and 46 of the Swiss Federal Law on Civil Protection).
Obviously this is an expensive law. The Swiss can afford it, because they're one if the richest countries in the world. In the case of disaster the Swiss are prepared. The rest of us are not.
Say Pandemic response preparation costs $10 billion a year, and the event occurs every hundred years. That means the total cost is $1T over 100 years.
Has the Pandemic caused more than $1T of damage to the United States? We've spent more than $1T just on the government bailout, which doesn't even come close to covering the damage to individuals and the economy as a whole. I'd say it easily exceeds $1T. Far more was spent on the Iraq war than on Covid preparation, yet the latter would have paid massive returns.
Frankly, pandemic response would be a rounding error compared to the defense budget. Even $2B a year in pandemic preparation might have saved us. That's only $200B per hundred years, far less than Covid has cost the US this year.
No. The direct cost at $10 billion a year might be $1T over 100 years. The opportunity cost, which is what I was talking about, is not $1T.
If you want to factor in opportunity cost you have to think of it like compound interest. $10 billion invested today could have a $1T payoff on its own over 100 years.
Inflation alone would make $10 billion in 1920 worth $128 billion today. And inflation doesn't account for any efficiency increases you can gain over time if you had invested the money otherwise.
> "... using the spare food ... Someone else will decide the flood huts are a waste"
Also, those politicians, get more votes — they can use the money they save when they sell the spare food, to lower the taxes or give people welfare money, and build and give away free houses in the valley.
Any politicians who want to keep the houses on the hills, are pretty powerless.
At the core, in a capitalist society, a company with no capital 'wasted' on distaster planning will out compete a company that has invested capital in disaster planning in the short term
And "short term" can mean quote long periods of time in practise. As a result we end up with this incredibly fragile system and society.
This can't be emphasised enough: capitalism is systemically biased against rational survival strategies.
It's fundamentally an irrational system which uses emotion and political leverage - with a bit of innovation - to maximise short-term individual gain.
But it has surrounded itself with a self-serving cloud of rhetoric about how it's "efficient" and "rational", when in fact it's astoundingly bad at dealing with planet-scale collective threats that could be easily handled with genuinely rational management.
I would say that anarchy, rather than capitalism, is biased in that way. I would not expect anarcho-capitalism to do any better or any worse than anarcho-communism.
Reason being, some rules just don’t make sense unless you have a deep understanding of the part of the world they interact with; and if you are free to flout those rules, it can be very tempting when you have no salient examples of the consequences of breaking them.
Lead was added to gasoline for improved performance, not to cause systemic increases in violence after 30 years of widespread use; CFCs were chosen because of their low toxicity, reactivity and flammability, not to catalytically destroy the ozone layer; antibiotics are used by meat farmers to increase growth rate and allow more intensive farming, not to trigger the evolution of MRSA. There are almost certainly other things which I could not even describe accurately that follow the same pattern.
I have no idea how to protect against disasters that only experts can comprehend without also allowing obsolete ideologies and standards organisations to crystallise against progress. But then, I’m only superficially familiar with political philosophy — I was about 30 when I learned of Chesterton’s Fence.
I think we can look at this differently; the problem isn't necessarily capitalism; it's that we don't live in a society that follows classically ideal capitalist dynamics anymore.
In a healthy capitalist system, you'd have enough competition to make this less of an issue. But healthy competition has been obliterated by our (politically condoned) race for short-term gains through economies of scale, and by the development of incorporation (hundreds of years ago by now, yet the conflicts with other social constructs like freedom of speech and capitalism have never really been addressed).
Any exact number is of course by definition flawed, but it's hard to imagine a stable capitalist system existing without much more vigorous competition - any firm with enough market share to significantly influence standards or think more about retaining users (i.e. lock-in) than about the competition is a problem; and much of our economy is made up of firms like that. At which size does that happen? Anything exceeding 1% market share?
Without sufficient variation and choice, the underlying dynamics (of capitalism) just don't work. In essence, we don't live in a classical capitalism with market forces converging on efficient solutions; but rather in an business or political world where barriers to entry and network effects form moats around inflexible fiefdoms in our society.
This isn't a problem that's easy to solve, because economies of scale work, and even if society at large would benefit from more dynamism, self-interest pulls individuals into corporations that are large enough to undermine competition. Furthermore, the rules we've invented surrounding incorporation strongly encourage this behavior, because it's a way to limit personal risk, and because a conceptual organization can choose to be many formal organizations, it's a way to for corporations to avoid bearing the costs of risks more generally than individuals can. Additionally, basic things like trademarks, patents and copyrights work in favor of centralization - and while I'm sure there are alternatives to those concepts, they're really deeply embedded in society, support well-connected vested interest with strong lobbies, have broad popular support, and in any case have a useful purpose too - replacing such concepts is essentially a non-starter, even if it would be beneficial in the long run.
So at best we can hope for reforms to increase resilience - those would be useful not just in catastrophic situations, but also to increase the effectiveness of capitalism in general. Reforms should limit the kind of exclusive control intellectual property offers (such that it's less suitable as a weapon to knock out competitors, and more suitable to earn income from those you cannot control yet use your innovations). We should have much stricter antitrust regulations, with fewer exceptions allowing large sizes (i.e. the default assumption should be that significant market share is harmful, and place the burden of proof the other way around to the way it is now) and smaller size limits before rules kick in. And we should reevalute the kind of protections corporations benefit from that do make sense for individuals; and perhaps to what extent incorporation can be used to shield owners from risks to encourage subsidiary-jungles less (or simply have a small tax on incorporation itself, much like individuals pay income tax - but on overall value, not profit, such that it's costly to have tons of layers of incorporation).
> I think we can look at this differently; the problem isn't necessarily capitalism; it's that we don't live in a society that follows classically ideal capitalist dynamics anymore.
When was that time supposed to be? In my years of studying history as a hobby, I've never encountered this mystical utopia of "true" free-market capitalism. In fact, as far as I know the ideology itself is mostly a product of the 20th century.
Oh definitely. We've never lived in an ideal anything ;-). Yet much of the assumptions about how capitalism will allocate resources efficiently rest on exactly the kind of properties we don't follow and are following increasingly poorly over the past decades. (Oh, I see I used the word "anymore" above. Well, that doesn't make sense, indeed).
As to the ideology: I blame the cold war for that; that shifted the debate firmly towards capitalism as an article of national identity, and the "more" the better (whatever that even means). To this day it's still common to hear the response that any criticism of capitalism is akin to communism - i.e. we're still identifying ourselves with this myth, even though communism (to the extent that that mystical utopia ever existed) has been defeated. And once something is a form of patriotic self-affirmation, it's too much to expect any kind of pragmatic, reasonable tuning to take place in politics (not that that's happening in politics currently regardless of topic, but I think that's a different matter).
I thought it was already obvious that extant economic systems necessitate hybridization.
Capitalism needs social and communal optimization and policy in order to not completely collapse, i.e. currently bailouts, but this can also be accomplished with effective policy and law. Communism needs capital wealth and free-market trading to not collapse into a material deficit.
"Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”
read more :
NewYorker:"The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System" ( April 21, 2020 )
Have to say I'm struggling to see the difference between the pandemic and the financial crisis. Both were utterly predictable as things which could happen but difficult to time [if anything, the financial crisis was much more predictable] and both were exacerbated because systems and economies were built around assuming such scenarios were unlikely in the immediate future and inherently self-limiting
I don't see much difference either. Maybe one factor in something being a Black Swan is just how widely or not the predictions are believed.
There were plenty of whisperings on the internet about a potential problem with sub-prime mortgages way before 2007. I even had a lecturer at university talking about Kondratiev waves[0] and how we were possibly nearing the end of one.
Not to fully justify it myself (I'm not sure I believe it either), but more to provide a devil's advocate perspective:
- A key part of the financial crisis is that, collectively the group of auditors and risk evaluators and experts who are supposed to understand/evaluate/quantify risk, generally failed to properly price in the risk of mortgage-backed securities failing en masse (they basically said, the chance of this happening is astronomically low, and were wrong by many orders of magnitude). Taleb's point was that, for certain events, it is surprisingly difficult to accurately assess their true probability, and even very advanced, highly-paid experts (with a strong vested interest in getting it right), can fail (and fail spectacularly). One of the lessons here is, to not place too much mis-placed confidence in certain kinds of estimates, and to be skeptical of gambling on certain probabilities which are fundamentally non-verifiable or hard to verify (even though they might look like regular probabilities and come packaged with lots of nice documentation and fancy equations and backed by lots of PhDs who tell you how wonderful their models are... we still need to be skeptical). When the weatherman tells you there's a 40% chance of rain, you can be sure that even though he might be wrong, he is very unlikely to be wrong by orders of magnitude (i.e. that the actual chance of rain is 4% or 0.004% or 100%); when a quant at an investment bank tells you that a AAA-rated MBS will fail with probability 0.00001%, you probably shouldn't trust that number in the same way, even though both are probabilities and both come with models and equations to support them.
- With COVID-19 and pandemics in general, it's not clear that the relevant public health experts failed to price in the risk or to accurately estimate/approximate the risk. What seems more likely is that our governments and businesses failed to heed their advice (i.e. that pandemics are inevitable, that they will happen with some regularity e.g. every 10-30 years, that in a globally connected world they will spread more rapidly than ever, etc.), and failed to act on the advice they were given (or in the case of the US, almost literally threw out the pandemic response handbook and ignored it). This makes it less of a "black swan" problem, and more of a regular (though still spectacular) failure of governance.
I might argue however that, there is perhaps a general tendency to incorrectly categorize such things as "black swan" events, which is an interesting phenomenon in and of its own (i.e. why do people want to take white swans and paint them black or to simply pretend as if they were black when they are not).
> Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions”
Based in the UK here, and this is what I find particularly galling.
If governments, including ours, had imposed travel restrictions in January people would have kicked up about it, and the travel industry would have been slammed, but thousands of lives would have been saved, and we would not now be in our deepest economic slump in over 40 years.
Sadly, as with various other countries, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the people at the highest levels of government and civil service here are utterly incompetent[1].
[1] Yes, I know their jobs are incredibly difficult but, as pointed out already, this was an entirely predictable set of circumstances. This is also not a partisan comment: our Conservative government have done an extremely poor job, but the Labour party are so useless they handed the them an easy landslide at the last general election, and the Lib Dems aren't even worth the bother of talking about.
I get that, but that's sort of the point, and in the UK we didn't do anything of substance until the end of March, which was far too late.
On 28th January I organised a DR drill, where everyone in our Cambridge office plus others in tech from other offices worked from home. This ran on 5th February. A week or two later I unofficially asked everyone on my team to stop all travel between offices, and requested key stakeholders not visit us in Cambridge. This was officially confirmed company-wide at the beginning of March. We shut all our offices and required all staff to work from home full-time 10 days before the government mandated lockdown began.
I'm not even holding this up as "we did a great job" because we were far too slow to act ourselves, but it's certainly not just 20/20 hindsight. I hear that trope far too often, and it's tiresome. I jolly well expect everyone in positions of leadership (including me) to have learned lessons from these events and do much better and act much more quickly next time around.
Again, let me reiterate that this situation was entirely predictable, and in fact was predicted by numerous experts, including Bill Gates.
Yeah but that's like the old quote that the stock market successfully predicted nine of the past five recessions. Sometimes, in hindsight, it might have been the right thing to do. But most of the time, when you look back at what people on HN said we needed to action about immediately, it would have been an absolute overreaction. You can't know which of the two situations you're in beforehand.
> Nobody was suggesting travel restrictions in January.
Not true, Trump was one of the first leaders to call for travel restrictions as far back as January, but back then the dominant narrative was that travel restrictions are bad, so he backed off.
I think of SARS & MERS as near-misses. They could've been a lot worse if the viruses were just a bit more contagious. Overall, it seems like some form of pandemic could be expected at least every 25 years or so, on average! I also wonder if this might be increasing in frequency as the world population grows & global travel becomes ever more common.
I think covid has been handled exceptionally poorly at every turn. Globally, we need to get a lot better at handling something like this. As bad as some viruses have been, it's not difficult to imagine even worse ones if a parameter or two were tweaked.
AIDS - an ongoing pandemic, 32 000 000 + deaths and counting (per Wikipedia). (The cynical adage about news applies here: "nothing ever happens in Africa.")
Mad Cow disease - major near miss. I am still not allowed to donate blood to this day, because I was in the UK in the mid-'80s.
It's egregiously lazy to call Covid-19 a "black swan".
Honestly given how the population in 1918 was between 1-2 billion [1], 1957 2.8 billion and 1968 3.5 billion, given that there's over twice as many people around now, we got off lightly.
You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk.
The spread of coronavirus outside China was in no way inevitable. Several potential pandemics were handled internally, this one escaped due to denial and incompetence, at which point it was harder to control. If it is utterly predictable we should be able to predict its course and fatalities - we can't.
If we had a large asteroid strike, famine, a robot rebellion, a collapse in world supply chains or super-volcano eruption it'd be 'inevitable' according to somebody somewhere, but most of the world didn't expect it and didn't prepare for it.
This wasn't "someone, somewhere" predicting it though: every epidemiologist predicted it. They said flu was the most likely, but they all also said a SARS-like coronavirus was another potential option (haemorrhagic fevers were the other type warned about). SARS and MERS weren't that long ago, and both had pandemic potential. Two near misses in the past 20 years means this was always a case of when not if.
The US had made preparations for a pandemic after SARS / MERS, but the funding was cut and the stockpile was neglected and had to be discarded. The advisories were given, people were aware, the system works, the people did their jobs. But the higher ups decided not to act, causing the biggest wave of deaths in living history.
Yes, and similar scenes played out everywhere that wasn't affected by SARS or MERS: they produced plans, issued advisories, but the politicians didn't act. Countries that were affected by SARS learnt their lesson, which is why they've dealt with this so much more effectively.
Masks were not mandatory in South Korea till well past the peak, though they are commonly worn.
Masks were not used in New Zealand which has had one of the best responses.
Masks are a useful low-cost measure but they're not sufficient on their own, quarantine and test and trace is far more effective and is probably what allowed those countries to get on top of their outbreaks so quickly, though honestly I'm not sure anybody knows the answers as yet about variations in infection and spread - we'll know a lot more in a few years in retrospect.
There's a common thread in most of the countries that have done incredibly badly though - the leaders have downplayed the risk and refused to take common sense measures to stop the spread (UK, Brazil, US).
I see mask a sort of like logs in warships used to plug leaks during battle. Cheap, easy to source and relatively effective enough in a pinch... at least enough to buy time for a proper response.
Might not be as effective as prepping before hand with better design, response or tactics. But you make do with what you got, competent leader or not.
Effectively the name of the game for the whole world is to buy enough time for a Vaccine to be created... or maybe for the virus to hopefully mutate into a more survivable form perhaps.
> You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk.
Before this pandemic people wouldn't care. Now it's happen people like you are still trying to justify it away.
Well, if you'd spoken to any epidemiologist (and I have) they'd have warned this was coming. It was inevitable.
Before: "nah, it won't happen". Now: "well, you can say anything in retrospect". This is the superpower of human stupidity, it can dismiss anything inconvenient.
I'm not attempting to justify or defend the US or the Chinese pandemic response to Coronavirus (both of which were awful).
I'm saying it was not utterly predictable in the course of its spread. The extent of the spread would have surprised most people, including epidemiologists if you asked them in January - precisely because we have encountered very similar viruses before and managed to contain them - it was always a possibility, but was considered by most of the world a remote one. Indeed, epidemiologists and governments in many countries knew about the virus in February, but not all reacted appropriately as they'd seen many such warnings before and for previous viruses it was contained and not a risk.
There's swine flu in humans in multiple locations in China at the moment and it is likely to evolve to jump human to human - are you personally preparing for it to spread in the US now? If not why not since its spread is, like coronavirus, inevitable?
Human stupidity also lends itself to retrospective reframing of events as inevitable and easily predictable when they are neither - it's easy to say everyone knew what was coming when talking in retrospect and very hard to accurately asses risk or probability.
At several points along the way, scientific experts (not one or a handful, but many) have made recommendations that were ignored by world leaders because they were seen as financially or politically costly.
Most of the disasters you mention are definitely predictable and we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that they will occur within the next x years. If x is anything more than 100, then people will ignore it, because our brains are biased to discount the odds of bad things happening to us.
We should at the least have a basic plan on what to do if those things happen, but it seems that many places didn't even accomplish that before this predictable pandemic occurred.
I don’t agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence, they didn’t help, but fundamentally this spread because most people don’t get that sick. Since people mostly feel ok, they’re not getting medical treatment and aren’t on the radar of any kind of intervention. Also, it’s not true to say that if you can say with certainty that something will happen, you know exactly how it’s going to go down. I know with 100% certainty that there will be another stock market bubble in the next 20 years, it’s completely predictable, but I can’t tell you when or how, because that is a different kind of knowledge, it’s situational rather than systemic.
> I don’t agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence
Indeed.There are countries that reacted better than others, but that didn't make the problem go away: it was still a major disruption to the economy and a major health problem causing some people to die. The magnitude of those problems is affected by competence (and luck), but it's not one of those things where if you play by the book you're just going to be fine.
I'm in no way disagreeing that countries like Vietnam have done a good job in keeping on top of the problem, but talking about any country's response in the past tense seems premature.
Pretty much any assessment needs to have a "so far" appended.
Technically if it happens in 21 years your 100% confident prediction is wrong. You'd still feel you kinda got it right, though. Certainty is a different beast. Not even "Tomorrow the sun will raise in the morning" can reach 100% certainty.
Correct, we didn't prepare for it. I would even say that politics stifled our response to a large degree. But, in my opinion, to say we didn't expect it, is incorrect. Sure, the average Joe may not have understood the potential risks, however epidemiologists were literally screaming the graveness of the situation at the public. The fact that people decided not to take heed was their ineptitude. The science and logic required to reduce the impact of the virus were all available, and the actions to be taken were fairly simple. The fact that people refused to take those actions in a timely manner, and that governments prioritised economy over public health are some of the reasons why we're in this mess. But we certainly were not caught by surprise - we had the time to react, and the knowledge to react well.
The thing is they actually have not prioritised anything, they thought they were prioritising, but actually caused a deeper recession by failing to contain the virus.
It's like prioritising cooking dinner over dealing with the house fire - it doesn't work that way.
No. Pandemics keep happening repeatedly and based on the past ~100 years, you'd be inclined to say that the frequency may be increasing: 1918, HIV, 1957, 1968, 2020. (and particularly so if you factor in the near-misses: SARS and MERS)
What about the set of events that "someone somewhere spent millions of dollars on and defined it as a national security risk and set up federally managed groups and processes to guard against it"? Seems to be a slightly smaller set.
If it actually happens then yes. By definition if someone says there will be a two headed shark attack near an atoll and it actually happens they made the correct prediction. I'd sure start taking two headed shark experts very seriously in that case.
It sounds impressive considering that politicians argued (and still argue, like in the case of Brazil) that it's not severe and we are still overreacting in the middle of people dying.
Here is a paper to back up your claims, where they apparently found traces of COVID-19 in Spain in March 2019. The paper is yet to be peer reviewed though:
It's an extraordinary claim but completely without evidence.
I've been following that, the only thing that is known is that there were some reactions activating tests, observed with the samples from March 2019, but not the whole virus, not even more markers, but just the two. Something like "a chemical probe that tests for presence of two times 10 letters", whereas a virus is something having 30000 letters. False positives using these kind of tests are possible, and even the "contamination" of the samples, and there isn't any demonstration that the authors made sure that wasn't a false positive.
Even worse, apparently nothing was actually isolated and preserved from the samples, in order to reproduce that, or isolate more letters, more a case of "the dog ate their homework" -- if I understood they claim they don't have the samples anymore?
In short: these researches used the search for 20 letters in the sample, which sometimes lies, even if that virus has 30000 letters, and they can't show that it wasn't a false positive. And even if the 20 letters have been there (only that month -- very improbable!), there's no sign that a whole virus has been.
The result from March 2019 is at the moment something that "needs more investigation" (if there is any material that can be tested again) but the presence of the virus during that month can't be established from that recently reported result.
Edit: the specification of the IP2 and IP4 gene tests that gave result in March 2019 sample:
Yeah, I've been thinking about how much false positives are with the result. I don't know about your background, but I am certainly not an epidemiologist, nor do I have the time to do the investigation, so I'd rather not get into the whole debate and wait for more published papers by people who are more knowledgeable than me in this area.
> I'd rather not get into the whole debate and wait for more published papers by people who are more knowledgeable than me in this area.
I've responded because it looked to me that you believe that the paper can "back up" the claims with, as you wrote: "traces of COVID-19 in Spain in March 2019."
I'm quite sure it can't show that COVID-19 was in Spain in March 2019, and even if the paper reports detecting IP2 and IP4 genes from the archived sample, even that is not certain.
No, I get it, I also find a lot of people who put links in to say "see, this is the definitive proof", I am not one of them; I've only put the paper into the response simply to add a bit more context to the other person's claim (since it was devoid of any form of links or reading material to back up his/her claim). I won't really believe that the study is true until there are more studies done on top of it and been peer reviewed (heck, peer reviewers can even be political!).
Regarding that specific case, everything relevant for us at the moment is behind the link you give and one internet search away:
It's dated "March 26, 2020" and it starts with "Italian researchers are looking at whether a higher than usual number of cases..."
If they were looking then, during the following three months we would have heard that they have found something? I understand they still haven't.
However, other research was done since: during the last months no virus was sequenced more often than SARS-CoV-2. The genomic information in the virus slowly changes and it can be used to determine the point when the virus started infecting humans:
"The origin of the regression between sampling dates and ‘root-to-tip’
distances (Fig. S3) provides a cursory point estimate for the time to the
MRCA (tMRCA) around late 2019. Using TreeDater (Volz and Frost,
2017), we observe an estimated tMRCA, which corresponds to the start
of the COVID-19 epidemic, of 6 October 2019–11 December 2019 (95%
CIs) (Fig. S4). These dates for the start of the epidemic are in broad
agreement with previous estimates performed on smaller subsets of the
COVID-19 genomic data using various computational methods
(Table 1), though they should still be taken with some caution."
That is one of the many reasons why "March 2019" doesn't fit. Another one is that COVID-19 hits every infected community very hard due to its fast spread, and such development just couldn't be ignored in any country, and even in the whole world -- look how much happened during last few months, and what happens when people try to ignore its existence.
It is very probable that the virus reached Europe before the start of 2020, even if it wasn't detected then. But not "March 2019."
"French hospital which has retested old samples from pneumonia patients discovered that it treated a man who had COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27"
And there is also a claim that in France there was a later reevaluated CT scan of the lungs that looked as a "typique Covid" that was initially dated "16 Nov 2019", but I haven't seen any independent confirmation of that claim:
I'm not aware of any proof for anything before Dec. 27 and it's possible there is or will be some. But I don't expect any other months than December or, at earliest and more unique, November.
I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who still refuse to believe that this pandemic even exists or that we are living through it. There is collective denial and disbelief. Even though we've had pandemics throughout human history. We've also had a constant stream of infectious diseases with pandemic potential - almost every year - for as long as I can remember.
Epidemiologists have been warning us that it was a matter of when, not if, when a "big one" strikes.
This is like experiencing annual tremors in a heavy seismic zone, then acting shocked when the earthquake eventually hits.
Black swan events aren't predictable by definition. They're usually events sufficiently rare that when they happen, it's the first time that category of event has been observed. This, we can't assess their likelihood since we have no real prior. So a market crash, plague, asteroid, etc. aren't black swan events. They just aren't rare enough. We've seen them. They have an annual probability. Hell, a COVID-like illness isn't even all that unlikely. A lethal fungal plague might be, since we've never seen such a thing in humans, although we've seen that in other mammals so it shouldn't come as a total shock.
As a better example, an AI apocalypse would be a black swan since we've never observed such an event and have no really great way of assessing its likelihood. Although we've some idea of that possibility.
To really get at the meat of it, consider the name. Black swans came as a surprise when Europeans visited Australia because a non-white swan had never before been observed. No one would even have thought to ask the question "what are the odds you find an all black swan in Australia?"
I think you are working with a harder defn of it than the original definition:
WP:
"Based on the [Taleb]'s criteria:
1 The event is a surprise (to the observer).
2 The event has a major effect.
3 After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected [...]"
I don't mean to add any fire to the debate. Just wanted to gently point out that the first recorded instances of a pandemic have happened so a pandemic does break the 3rd rule.
I think other commenters have pointed out that the reaction of global leadership has been a surprise with major effects that will be rationalised in the future. Making their reaction to the event itself the black swan event.
In a rational world, we'd have expected leaders to band together against a potential pandemic. That this level of incompetency should have been expected will be the rationalization that follows.
If you read the book Black Swan, it is exactly one of its defining characteristics that it is unpredictable. The only thing you can do against black swans is making systems less fragile.
Small nitpick: Unpredictable for the observer. So in a way this pandemic was a black swan for some (naive) people.
On the other hand, I think it's good that someone like Taleb now goes around and pokes all the policymakers and governments that nothing of this was unpredictable and Corona is a white swan event.
It’s been a while I read it, but you are right. Personally I think it already ranks amongst the most important books of the 21st century. Everyone should read it.
I didn't perceive it as a black swan at all. It was more like having more snow in the winter than we are used to and therefore having roofs collapse. — yes — there was more snow than usual, but — no — it was still in tune with what would have been reasonable to assume.
Our roofs didn't collapse because of an unfantomable amount of snow, our roofs collapse because they were poorly built, badly maintained and all the money went into the fences to our neighbours instead (partly because we hate them, partly because we want to impress them).
We have also seen (in eurioe and the US) the kind of political paradigms that accompany, and cover for, systematic ineptitude.
Lockdown Vs Not has been (is) mostly centred around a specific dichotomy. Freedom, economic health, employment, etc one hand. The spread of covid in the other.
Those trade-off a exist, but just because a trade-off exists does not mean that it is always the operative dynamic. It is just the only decision left when ineptitude takes other options off the table.
Institutional competency is a primary force.
Where I live (Ireland) a failure to equip & prepare nursing homes accounted for a large number of deaths. It was just out of reach, in terms of our institutional ability to react in the necesytimeframe.
Testing, on a scale that can control the pandemic, was feasible. It would have been an achievement, but it was not impossible. Ireland has a large meditech & pharma industry. The resource and knowledge exist. We just weren't able to do it.
It can't be a question of costs. The cost in lives and their value might be debatable. The cost in money is not. What does a month of lockdown cost?
I'm slowly re-reading it again and it is quite surreal - the first chapter describes a team from the US investigating a nasty disease in South America in the 1950s and literally one of the complaints their senior's have about the project is that it is "no worse than flu" when it was actually a highly dangerous disease.
The basic message of this book is: it's not if but when this happens.
But black swans always look obvious in retrospect. There were always reasons to believe a given black swan would happen, it's just that those reasons were ignored beforehand. The possibility of a plague was well known, but besides people in the medical field there wasn't much thought put towards them.
Heck, I well knew that medical experts were predicting a plague, but if you'd asked me in 2019 what the next black swan would be I'd have guessed catastrophic climate change.
Considering the population to the time of great plagues, this one is pretty harmless in comparison and I don't think the reaction was particularly bad. I hope the long term effects aren't as pronounced as feared. The economic damage will be significant and we will see that in a few weeks probably.
The definition from Wikipedia reads: "The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight."
people get surprised all the time by events that have a low percentage chance of happening but are not unique, I mean people get surprised when their spouse cheats on them and that isn't particularly unlikely.
Anyway, I would agree a black swan needs a very low chance of happening, but not that it has to be the first time it has ever happened.
Certainly when the Europeans saw the black swan in Australia it was the first time they had seen one, but probably not the first time they had seen a variation of a species in a non-European location that looked slightly different than expected.
Wikipedia is not an authority on anything. It will be just as wrong as the misconceptions of whoever wrote the synopsis.
The term black swan in this context was coined by Nassim Taleb; he wrote a book about it, which when fully understood distinguishes predictable but rare from completely unexpected.
That Wikipedia manages to mangle this doesn’t mean the originator of the term suddenly became wrong.
We’ve had pandemics repeatedly throughout recorded history and before. It’s not as though the world went “a virus what is this we’ve never seen anything like it”.
The black plague, the flu of 1918, and numerous other examples of epidemic diseases have struck down multitudes over thousands of years. Even Sars was just a score of years ago.
We were simply inept when it came to Covid-19. We dropped the ball. The thing about Covid isn’t how unexpected it was, it’s how utterly predictable it has been at every single turn.