The coronavirus pandemic isn’t a ‘black swan.’ It’s a gray rhino, according to author Michele Wucker, who wrote in Tuesday’s Washington Post that only the willfully blind could not foresee the new coronavirus pandemic. (See her column at https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/03/17/no-coronavirus-pandemic-wasnt-an-unforseen-problem/)
Indeed, she points out, such a scenario was suggested when the “Center for Strategic and International Studies ran an eerily prescient pandemic simulation involving a coronavirus similar to the current one: around a 3 percent mortality rate, transmissible before symptoms showed and highly contagious.”
And Daniel Dale of CNN (as published in the Mercury News at https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/16/analysis-yes-people-did-foresee-this-pandemic-happening/) had a similar take on the matter when he debunked President Trump’s repeated description of the pandemic as a problem that nobody anticipated.
Dale quoted the President as saying the crisis is “an unforeseen problem” that “came out of nowhere,” March 6. “We’re having to fix a problem that, four weeks ago, nobody ever thought would be a problem,” he said on March 11. “It’s something that nobody expected,” he said again on March 14.
Facts First Dale reported: Trump is just wrong. The US intelligence community, public health experts and officials in Trump’s own administration had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic. Some of the warnings specifically mentioned the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic. And when this particular coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was identified in China in early January, health experts quickly cautioned it could be a major problem around the world.
“This was foreseeable, and foreseen, weeks and months ago, and only now is the White House coming out of denial and heading straight into saying it could not have been foreseen,” Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said on Sunday.
At least the Administration has stepped up its response. Finally.
What do you think?
Mar 2020