Not with a bang, but a cough.


The coronavirus outbreak in China has me thinking about disease. Outbreaks remind me that this is quite possibly how the world ends: not with a bang, but a cough.

Being ready for disease outbreaks is challenging. It is hard to know how likely they are, or how bad they’ll be when they start. Some seem serious, and fizzle out: others seem fine, and suddenly become crises (think how the yearly flu suddenly became Spanish flu in 1918, and killed more people than both world wars).

In other words, pandemics are a black swan: a hard-to-predict, rare, and high-impact event. At the same time, preparing for them is a public good: the whole world benefits if a country has better disease detection and response systems, because it reduces how far the disease spreads. Like all public goods, I suspect that means the world is underprepared: for the same reason that no one wants to act on climate change, no one wants to be the one that invests in disease prevention as much as they should, at least not until after the outbreak starts.

Technology is a mixed blessing. Yes, a more globalized world is a riskier one: a disease is only a flight away from spreading to another country. But, borders also now have machines that detect body temperature, to identify sick people trying to fly. If a quarantine is imposed, as in Wuhan, Amazon deliveries mean people no longer have to go to crowded malls and markets to get food and medicine, minimizing the risk of contagion. AI could also help with early detection of symptoms, if it is given the data to do so. Collaboration between countries can help quarantine cases and develop vaccines to stop the spread.

In other words, a more centralized, integrated world is better able to defend itself if it invests in advance, but far more at risk if the defenses fail given the potential for worldwide transmission. That means investing in defenses is more important than ever. I’m not sure we are any better than before at making those investments, though. I’m not even sure that as a society we have a frame for thinking about how much investment in disease prevention is the right amount: how do we know when we’ve invested enough? Too often, we think about that only after the outbreak has started, rather than preparing in advance and investing in the public good. 

It makes me nervous, Ymous. How can we know if we're ready for black swans, and change course if we're not?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pilgrim

 Your post is so rich - I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps first to say that yes, let us discuss offline a quotidian address 2.0. :) Your distinction between true progress and experienced progress is an interesting one, and one that rings true to me. If we are progressing, but lack the contextual supports to make us feel we are, is our solution in part a change in mindset? A different way of seeing our lives and world, a new way of counting those markers? I have been reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I find esoteric in the literal sense: I can't read it intensively, rather I scatter my attention across the page and see what leaps out at me. I suspect I could read it again and notice totally different things. It is a mix of philosophy, religion, Freudian psychoanalysis, and storytelling. Still, it has led me to reflect on enlightenment - what is it? It seems to me a common thread across many conceptions is that the enlightened realize that mos...
Read more

Cultivation

 I have no definition of enlightenment. As I gestured at in my last post, I think it has something to do with realizing what matters and what doesn't matter; and that a vast amount on which we spend time in our lives doesn't matter. Realizing it not just in the sense of being able to say it, but to truly feel it. Your point about a deeper connection to the world seems important too: that is something that does matter, I think.  On the other hand, the link to physical exercise troubles me. It's certainly possible that's enlightenment, but if it is simply exhaustion making you care less about things, then to my mind it is not. Enlightenment, I think, isn't just about not caring about what doesn't matter (which, temporarily, could result from exhaustion) but also caring deeply about what does. Let me try another angle. I tend to believe that competition is fundamentally important to self-improvement. When done well, it can push us to be better, to improve, whether ...
Read more

Rara Avis

How can we know if we're ready for black swans, and change course if we're not? Great question. I like to reason about collective human systems (societies, organizations, etc) using the same set of tools I would for studying a machine learning systems. Partly, this is because when you've got a nice new hammer, everything takes on a distinctively nailish aspect. However, it also seems that despite humans being agents exercising individual autonomy, collections of humans are awfully good at climbing uphill relative to metrics you can get them to agree to care about. We are all living longer, children are dying less frequently, and we are on average more wealthy. Also like a machine learning model, we often improve these metrics to the detriment of things outside of our collectively agreed upon reward function (externalities) and we don't distribute the average across all people, but that is a discussion for another time. So, I guess my first answer to your question ab...
Read more