We simply observe that COVID is not on the convex hull of bad-pandemic-causing parameters. It’s a luckier roll of the dice than the one portrayed in the plausible Pandemic movie.
The “next” pandemic is likely to revert to the mean, but it seems like over 20% chance that on a 30-year timescale there will be a virus with much higher IFR and/or much higher R0, maybe due to much more surface and aerosol spread than SARS-CoV-2 which is apparently mostly droplet spread.
It is worth noting that the same virus with a higher IFR doesn’t obviously kill more people, especially if it kills children, because there would be a more aggressive reaction. Very possible it gets squashed entirely.
And if we had a similarly deadly disease with much more spread, we’d have been forced into herd immunity strategy quickly. Which again, isn’t obviously better or worse as an outcome.
If both were much worse, of course, that would be much much worse.
If COVID were 3x higher on either parameter, it probably wouldn’t have led to a more effective US federal response. My guess is that it would just have been a much bigger crisis.
We simply observe that COVID is not on the convex hull of bad-pandemic-causing parameters. It’s a luckier roll of the dice than the one portrayed in the plausible Pandemic movie.
The “next” pandemic is likely to revert to the mean, but it seems like over 20% chance that on a 30-year timescale there will be a virus with much higher IFR and/or much higher R0, maybe due to much more surface and aerosol spread than SARS-CoV-2 which is apparently mostly droplet spread.
It is worth noting that the same virus with a higher IFR doesn’t obviously kill more people, especially if it kills children, because there would be a more aggressive reaction. Very possible it gets squashed entirely.
And if we had a similarly deadly disease with much more spread, we’d have been forced into herd immunity strategy quickly. Which again, isn’t obviously better or worse as an outcome.
If both were much worse, of course, that would be much much worse.
If COVID were 3x higher on either parameter, it probably wouldn’t have led to a more effective US federal response. My guess is that it would just have been a much bigger crisis.