You’re right that the wiggle room is a bug for historical testing purposes.
Even in this case, I disagree with two of your points. A treatment was available from the beginning. The original question isn’t whether a vaccine “and” treatment is available, it’s “or.”
I also don’t consider Mexico a “major economy,” so the travel restriction to Japan wouldn’t count. Others may disagree! In the future for testing purposes, I’ll use the size of Mexico’s fraction of world GDP as my threshold since I admit Mexico could be categorized either way.
I think you’re right that there was evidence of 1%+ mortality in early days. I’m not sure when that came down.
An important question is whether the criteria should be met all at once in order to count. My inclination is “yes.” If so, swine flu probably scores even lower, given for example that the death toll didn’t hit 2,000 until August.
I think ambiguity is a feature for practical use. “Is Mexico really a major economy? Do we really have enough evidence to say there’s a 1% death rate?” These are exactly the kinds of debates this alarm bell is meant to provoke. The criteria are primarily meant to give people an excuse and motivation to start a debate, not to end it.
I’ll keep all this in mind and perhaps overhaul it when I’ve done some more testing. Thanks for the feedback!
Those are fair critiques. In 2009, Mexico was 1.5% of world GDP. I think for future efforts, I’ll arbitrarily choose 2% of world GDP as my cutoff for “major economy.”
I don’t think we’ve ever had a vaccine in the early days of a novel illness, so it’s not useful as a way to distinguish more from less dangerous illnesses. I might even remove it entirely and just focus on whether treatments are available.
This heuristic is a non-authoritative plan for guiding conversation and research efforts. Part of that plan is the “alarm bell” criteria, which is akin to basic guidance you might give people on whether they should pull a real-life fire alarm. Other people might have criteria that are more loose or strict for whether they should pull the fire alarm. That’s fine. But the concept of having a fire alarm you can pull, a dialog about when you pull it, a set of common sense notions for when it’s OK, and what to do when somebody does, I think is valuable. I’m trying to help organize that effort.
These criteria are going to have to be vetted with historical data, refined over time, and eventually replaced. But it’s a place to start.
Well, it’s just easy for me to imagine someone saying “major new illness in China? Sounds bad for the global economy.” It’s harder to imagine them saying that about Mexico.
I’m assuming that it’s easier for a disease to spread within a country than to cross international borders. So it’s more likely to wreak havoc in the economy of a country it’s in already than one it hasn’t yet reached. A virus in Mexico has access to 2% of world GDP. In China it has access to 16%. Much more destructive potential.
GDP follows a power law so there are a few economies—the USA, China, the EU, and Japan, where it matters greatly whether a pandemic is spreading.
From one point of view, maybe spread doesn’t matter. Either a disease has the transmissibility to spread worldwide and evade containment, like COVID, or it doesn’t, like Ebola.
If that were true, only R0 and case fatality rate would be needed to adequately predict the consequences of a disease. It wouldn’t matter which countries the disease was in.
That would be an interesting alternative model, with the virtue of simplicity.
For this model, I tried to pick factors that I think the public and epidemiologists would consider important, including spread and whether it was in bigger more prosperous countries. That may or may not matter for predicting the stock market, but I think it does matter for starting a conversation about a future pandemic, which is the whole point of this project.
You’re right that the wiggle room is a bug for historical testing purposes.
Even in this case, I disagree with two of your points. A treatment was available from the beginning. The original question isn’t whether a vaccine “and” treatment is available, it’s “or.”
I also don’t consider Mexico a “major economy,” so the travel restriction to Japan wouldn’t count. Others may disagree! In the future for testing purposes, I’ll use the size of Mexico’s fraction of world GDP as my threshold since I admit Mexico could be categorized either way.
I think you’re right that there was evidence of 1%+ mortality in early days. I’m not sure when that came down.
An important question is whether the criteria should be met all at once in order to count. My inclination is “yes.” If so, swine flu probably scores even lower, given for example that the death toll didn’t hit 2,000 until August.
I think ambiguity is a feature for practical use. “Is Mexico really a major economy? Do we really have enough evidence to say there’s a 1% death rate?” These are exactly the kinds of debates this alarm bell is meant to provoke. The criteria are primarily meant to give people an excuse and motivation to start a debate, not to end it.
I’ll keep all this in mind and perhaps overhaul it when I’ve done some more testing. Thanks for the feedback!
[Deleted]
Those are fair critiques. In 2009, Mexico was 1.5% of world GDP. I think for future efforts, I’ll arbitrarily choose 2% of world GDP as my cutoff for “major economy.”
I don’t think we’ve ever had a vaccine in the early days of a novel illness, so it’s not useful as a way to distinguish more from less dangerous illnesses. I might even remove it entirely and just focus on whether treatments are available.
This heuristic is a non-authoritative plan for guiding conversation and research efforts. Part of that plan is the “alarm bell” criteria, which is akin to basic guidance you might give people on whether they should pull a real-life fire alarm. Other people might have criteria that are more loose or strict for whether they should pull the fire alarm. That’s fine. But the concept of having a fire alarm you can pull, a dialog about when you pull it, a set of common sense notions for when it’s OK, and what to do when somebody does, I think is valuable. I’m trying to help organize that effort.
These criteria are going to have to be vetted with historical data, refined over time, and eventually replaced. But it’s a place to start.
Why shouldn’t Mexico count? Why should it be different if a disease starts in China then if it starts in Mexico?
Well, it’s just easy for me to imagine someone saying “major new illness in China? Sounds bad for the global economy.” It’s harder to imagine them saying that about Mexico.
I’m assuming that it’s easier for a disease to spread within a country than to cross international borders. So it’s more likely to wreak havoc in the economy of a country it’s in already than one it hasn’t yet reached. A virus in Mexico has access to 2% of world GDP. In China it has access to 16%. Much more destructive potential.
GDP follows a power law so there are a few economies—the USA, China, the EU, and Japan, where it matters greatly whether a pandemic is spreading.
From one point of view, maybe spread doesn’t matter. Either a disease has the transmissibility to spread worldwide and evade containment, like COVID, or it doesn’t, like Ebola.
If that were true, only R0 and case fatality rate would be needed to adequately predict the consequences of a disease. It wouldn’t matter which countries the disease was in.
That would be an interesting alternative model, with the virtue of simplicity.
For this model, I tried to pick factors that I think the public and epidemiologists would consider important, including spread and whether it was in bigger more prosperous countries. That may or may not matter for predicting the stock market, but I think it does matter for starting a conversation about a future pandemic, which is the whole point of this project.
The main reason why COVID-19 is bad for the market and for us in the West is because it wasn’t easily containable.
Whether or not the first cases happens in some Chinese provience or in Mexico doesn’t matter much for that.