When China quarantines an entire city, you should be afraid of what’s in that city.
I think I’m qualified to answer this question because I was paying attention to COVID-19 since the Wuhan quarantine, many months before the pandemic spread to the West. The day person-to-person spread was confirmed in the United States, I sprung into action.
Create personal fire alarms for events with the potential for sustained exponential growth. More generally, you should prepare far in advance to protect yourself from anything the authorities are unprepared for (especially disasters unprecedented in living memory).
Mod note: This has nothing to do with the topic of this post, and veers into random political discussion. Comments like this are not welcome on LessWrong and can lead to a ban.
When China quarantines an entire city, you should be afraid of what’s in that city.
I think I’m qualified to answer this question because I was paying attention to COVID-19 since the Wuhan quarantine, many months before the pandemic spread to the West. The day person-to-person spread was confirmed in the United States, I sprung into action.
You made two mistakes.
You treated the news as something other than a propaganda machine. News is more noise than signal. We have known the world is at risk of a deadly pandemic for many years, yet the news dramatically underestimated the importance of COVID in the first several months of the pandemic.
You didn’t grok that pandemics grow exponentially and have long-tailed outcomes.
Here are the antidotes.
Ignore the news. Focus on long-term knowledge instead.
Create personal fire alarms for events with the potential for sustained exponential growth. More generally, you should prepare far in advance to protect yourself from anything the authorities are unprepared for (especially disasters unprecedented in living memory).
_
What do you mean?
_
Mod note: This has nothing to do with the topic of this post, and veers into random political discussion. Comments like this are not welcome on LessWrong and can lead to a ban.
Oh, I thought the original comment was literally “_”, because the reply “What do you mean?” also makes sense in that context.