I'm going to do a short thread and brace yourself, I'm going to defend the Chinese government and most governments response to corona. Taleb got a lot of attention for his paper on pre-emptive risk mitigation on corona (it's better to treat it seriously) but I think there is 1/n
Another Taleb idea that is probably more applicable here: fooled by randomness. Assume you are a government official in any place in the world and you are told there is some new flu like outbreak. Details are sketchy. Are you going to immediately call for a shutdown in 2/n
travel and barricade cities? No. Really almost no one is going to do that. This gets to a subsequent point. pre-Chinese New Year in China is kind of like pre-Christmas in the US. Lots of travel and non-normal activities with something like this that would PROBABLY 3/n
slip through the cracks in China or anywhere given the time of year. Even if it weren't CNY, I wonder if China or any country would have moved rapidly faster. You don't just shut down travel and quarantine cities without lots of strong evidence. Then fooled by randomness 4/n
The level of travel made it very difficult to both justify and track everything that was happening even for China. Now let's expand the circle even more. According to some reports, the incubation is up to or even longer than a month? That means people can be carriers and 5/n
Infect others without even knowing it or displaying symptoms. If you are China or the US or other countries, you simply can't test everyone entering your country even if you just limit it to people coming from regions of the world and even then the tests show such 6/n
Inconsistent results with long incubation periods you would have very hit or miss idea whether you would just be better off flipping a coin when someone arrived. None of this is to say China has done a great job. They clearly haven't. However, there is this mistaken idea 7/n
that we can control our environment to such a degree that even unknown disease can be controlled. We should be vigilant and try to learn where to improve but I think there is an obsession with controlling our environment to an unhealthy degree when we really can't control 8/n
the personal interactions of 7b+ people and how disease might spread across porous borders and unknown interactions. This is called humanity people.
