Exactly. This is the furthest thing from a black swan. A global pandemic was always a matter of when, not if (still is). That, by definition, is not a black swan. Plus, we in EU/NA had plenty of notice since January to prepare, and we chose to bury our head in the sand instead.
Prominent people call this a black swan just to deflect responsibility, and perhaps to get a bit of bailout money on the side.
Indeed. A black swan is something you never thought could exist before because you've only seen white swans. We've had pandemics in the past, though not as serious as this one. This is not a black swan, and calling it a black swan just undermines what a black swan is.
> We've had pandemics in the past, though not as serious as this one.
There have been much more serious pandemics in the past, way too many to even list here. I'll briefly mention two because we know them well in the western canon -- the 1918 flu epidemic and the black death.
Please. I don't remember almost all economic activity ceasing because of AIDS, SARS, or Ebola. I certainly don't remember most of the US being under stay-at-home orders. This particular pandemic is an extreme outlier, so it's a black swan.
But ArialMinaei there's not that much more they could have done. It still would have had 20x the mortality rate of the usual flu strain and it still would have had an RO of 3 or 4. Once something that fits those parameters is loosed on the world, the rest is a fait accompli- we're going into social distancing, lockdown, whatever it's being called.
Yes respirators and masks, I know, but the previous administration had gone through the same thing on a smaller scale and stockpiles were not replenished possibly because experts said it won't happen again for a while (I am giving the previous administration the benefit of the doubt here.. I don't know why they didn't replace those items).
The point here is, there's not that much that even had all information been available, and masks, and respirators, the world could have done. It's literally a force of nature that humans have a limited ability to deal with instantly.
I am not defending any political or public policy department past or present. I am just stating the obvious. Everything else is 20/20 hindsight aimed at the margins of effectiveness, so why go there ?
If you look at who has the LEAST per million (absolute number of cases are worse than useless and what most statisitic sites are showing) it's not nations usually associated with good governance, ahem...
So what's going on.
It's traffic. Flights into a nation, and especially flights from China. The nations with the best per capita numbers are low-air-traffic nations, per capita, so Belize, South Africa, Thailand, Andorra places like that.
So mystery solved. The difference between the US and Germany, the best of the "developed" nations, is not that big at all. For a long time, weeks and weeks, it's been mid 700s for BOTH nations. I am not sure where the very latest data is getting we're at 100 per million now, but still they're comparable in the larger scheme of things.
It's not some foreign virus anymore. It's endemic everywhere. How many people die in any given place is now directly a result of the containment measures put into place there. You can't keep blaming this on China. Even places that have very tenuous connections to China are now experiencing massive death rates, because they aren't handling it well.
"How many people die in any given place is now directly a result of the containment measures put into place there"
Without supporting an alternative theory, this sounds doubtful to me. Do you think, for instance, that the difference between West Virginia and New York is a result of the superior containment measures in the former? WV has a lower death rate so far than even South Korea.
It's way too early to be making these comparisons. Wait until the pandemic is over and then we can analyze the death rates. Otherwise you're just talking about where it spread first, which is not the same as how well each place managed the totality of it.
The virus started in China.
The virus spread from China because of of the Communist Chinese Party's denial and lack of response.
Those are, in turn intimately connected to the fact that China is a one-party dictatorship that murdered the doctors who first tried to bring their attention to COVID-19 in the early days of the virus, lest the world forget.
Currently, Chinese epidemological numbers cannot be trusted because the Chinese Communist Party, on top of being a murderer of its own truth-telling scientists, is a pathological liar and manipulator of information, like all Communist regimes.
That's all I said about China; maybe someone said something more, so talk to them.
How many people die, the death rate from COVID-19, is about the same in most nations and mostly a function of age and previously existing health issues.
Aside from these facts, I don't even know what in my post you could be reacting to.
We didn’t need different CCP numbers to have taken more effective action in the UK, we just needed to listen to public health experts rather than statistical epidemiologists and motivated thinkers in government. Germany, Austria, S Korea are all just as, if not more, connected to China than the UK and Spain but are faring much better because they have competent govt, distributed and robustly funded public health systems. This is not a black swan event because it has long been predicted by mainstream epidemiologists.
I think people may be rushing to judgment, as a snapshot in time right now may not tell you where things will end up in each country.
I was looking at a chart of the trajectory of the epidemic in different countries, and it was interesting because there were at least three qualitatively different types of curves.
South Korea and China are notable for nearly completely flattening out after a certain point. The former might tend to undermine conspiracy theories about China, I don't know. On the other hand, why have no other countries had the same experience? Could it be the response, or characteristics of data gathering and reporting?
Japan and Singapore have risen much more slowly than the US and hard-hit European countries, but do not seem to be flattening which is surprising and seems ominous.
The western countries that have a lot of cases seem to have a characteristic sort of gradual curve, that rose faster early on, gradually is leveling out, but not completely (yet). The US looks similar to the others, except it is larger and continuing to suggest a higher peak.
I am wondering if Japan, and maybe the US states that are not initially seeing a lot of cases, will end up being a second wave after things seem to be under control in a lot of places.
Prominent people call this a black swan just to deflect responsibility, and perhaps to get a bit of bailout money on the side.