Back in April 2020, I made an alarm bell for the next pandemic. It attempts to capture in checklist form some of the qualities of COVID that, in retrospect, could have signaled that this was no Swine Flu. I think there are basically two ways we could have avoided this mistake:
Understanding that we should be worried not only about certainties, but about risks. We were right to worry about the downside potential of Swine Flu, and we were just lucky that time. Likewise, we’d still be right to worry about the downside potential of COVID, even though Swine Flu didn’t turn out to be as bad as we feared.
Looking at the underlying mechanisms that distinguish a pandemic potential from a non-pandemic potential illness, as I tried to capture in the alarm bell.
Back in April 2020, I made an alarm bell for the next pandemic. It attempts to capture in checklist form some of the qualities of COVID that, in retrospect, could have signaled that this was no Swine Flu. I think there are basically two ways we could have avoided this mistake:
Understanding that we should be worried not only about certainties, but about risks. We were right to worry about the downside potential of Swine Flu, and we were just lucky that time. Likewise, we’d still be right to worry about the downside potential of COVID, even though Swine Flu didn’t turn out to be as bad as we feared.
Looking at the underlying mechanisms that distinguish a pandemic potential from a non-pandemic potential illness, as I tried to capture in the alarm bell.