A pandemic is not a black swan. Just like Earth quakes are not black swans. There is a Center for Disease Control for fighting pandemics.
We built fragile but efficient (for profit optimization) systems that had a good run. People plan for and about pandemics or at least pretended to, when needed grants.
edit: Black Swans are very very low probable events. Pandemics have been around in human history enough times.
edit2: Here is Taleb on cnbc...pandemic and blackswan.
I think the black swan event is less of the pandemic itself and more of how it played out. If actions were taken and the pandemic was halted early, there would be less impact. At least speaking of the US.
The pandemic has gone on for far longer than it really needed to due to the politicization of safety measures. Several countries were able to nearly beat back the pandemic rather early, but the US is currently sitting in a third or fourth wave due to asinine behaviors of a few state governments.
Yes, a pandemic itself isn't black swan, but just how badly this was fumbled sure seems like it is (at least I damn well hope the next one isn't so badly managed).
Finland’s was quite light touch, apart from the start where bars had to shut along with schools and WFH, ‘lockdown’ here was not in the same league as say the UK or France. There never were and are not now enforceable mask mandates and the more empty parts of the country have been restriction free for most of the year.
Maybe it was luck, a sparse population or of course the often repeated ‘everyone always does what they’re told’ (hmmm). Also it started off well but things have become quite fragmented recently (different agencies issuing rules about different things at different times, in different regions, much to the dismay of anyone trying to plan anything). In short, whilst interesting, there’s not really any useful comparison that you can make between the US and Finland in my opinion.
Objectively the population density of Helsinki [1] is half that of London [2] - and according to google, a tenth of that of Paris.
Subjectively after living in both Helsinki and London it feels like Helsinki is even less crowded.
I would say that there are fewer people who commute in to commercial areas from outside of the city than in London, and the commercial areas such as offices are generally a lot less dense, newer, and more spread out.
Yeah, it's still not 'very low'. The population density of the town I live in, which is not 'very low', is ~400 per square km. The county, which is denser than most of the area of the US, is 12 per square km.
New Zealand is an example. Auckland has an outbreak right now and has relatively severe restrictions again, but the rest of the country has very few restrictions beyond mask use. My life would have been impacted far less had I been in Auckland instead of a big city in the US.
Sure and in my opinion it’s a better system for me personally and if I had an in-person business my balance sheet would prefer it too. All to obscure an incredibly important point that their death toll has been minimal, under 50 as far as I can see. USA is nearing 700,000.
Which Pandemic got resolved in span of 18 months, I would like to know. The medieval ones took decades to burn through the planet and the spanish flu took 50 million+ and last more than 2 years.
Systems built without taking the Pandemic risk into account are the issue here, Pandemic itself we know it was coming.. we also have movies about them.
We also had pandemic plans that got completely tossed out the window. Interestingly if you read them most say to not do any of what we did, including masks.
Also, what pandemics had multiple vaccines delivered in record time? Ones that worked better than was ever hoped for. Even with that, which was the end goal, society seems unable to move on.
The pandemic was definitely extended in the US due to politics.
Every attempt at curtailing the spread was rolled back or defeated specifically due to politics at the highest levels of the US Gov't, from not implementing travel bans as appropriate to blocking masking mandates, to state level gov'ts re-opening economies and lifting lockdowns during surges. The current hot-spots in the US are almost perfectly aligned on US political boundaries.
Even now it continues as masking and vaccination continues to be politicized with one side spreading obviously unfounded FUD around the vaccine and inflammatory messaging that masking children is "child abuse".
Being ‘extended’ 1) assumes we know when it will be over (we don’t yet!), and 2) we can calculate when/if we are through it, and when/if we would have been through it.
It would have required massive, and likely unsuccessful mobilization to lock down travel (both foreign and domestic) enough to actually control Covid aka New Zealand. Considering the land borders and smuggling problems there alone, I think it would have been ultimately futile.
Considering how politically fragmented the country was and still is even before the pandemic, trying it somewhat successfully may also have kicked off a Civil war - not that anyone would have tried that hard.
Vaccination rollouts could definitely have gone smoother, and better programs to manage the rollouts would have also been really nice - but given the situation above, it would only have been a (short) while before Delta or something like it got going anyway and started spreading.
Fewer would have died from COVID probably, but overall deaths may have been similar (more violence during riots? More shooting and civil unrest), and the fear and other issues (socio political strife for instance) would still have happened, just looked different probably. These types of situations are brutally hard.
Overall, I’d give the US a solid ‘C’ grade. Not great, not terrible.
An interesting thing here from a biological standpoint is the assumption that a global pandemic is akin to a "100 year flood". Our understanding of climate suggests 100 year floods will be more commonplace -- will 100 year pandemics be as well?
I actually surprised we haven't had any big ones other than this in lets say past 50 years. It's clear that world is much more interconnected than ever before so pandemics should also be more common. But I wouldn't really even consider this one so big. Multiple percentage of global population hasn't died...
A pandemic is not a black swan. Just like Earth quakes are not black swans. There is a Center for Disease Control for fighting pandemics.
We built fragile but efficient (for profit optimization) systems that had a good run. People plan for and about pandemics or at least pretended to, when needed grants.
edit: Black Swans are very very low probable events. Pandemics have been around in human history enough times.
edit2: Here is Taleb on cnbc...pandemic and blackswan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI