Actually, it very likely is. The first and the last.
AFAIK, the world has never had a global pandemic where vast numbers of people stopped working out of fear of becoming infected. We have had pandemics where vast numbers of people stopped working because they were dead. But that’s nothing like what we have today. (The Spanish flu was associated with only a very brief and mild recession.)
As for the future, who can say? We now have a company that has a million thermometers in circulation, all linked to a central database. It picked up the oncoming disaster in America well before most other people, but its warnings were ignored by the government. Now this company says that the number of high fevers in America is falling fast. We shall see.
Does anyone doubt that this is the wave of the future—connecting IT with medicine? That we’ll be able to spot epidemics in real time? Does anyone doubt that in the future our ability to test huge numbers of people for viruses will be scaled upward dramatically? It was 102 years between the Spanish flu and this epidemic. Say it’s another 57 or 91 or 114 years until the next big one. Does anyone feel confident predicting what health care will look like that far into the future?
Don’t get me wrong, I believe we will face major medical challenges in the future. There’s a growing risk of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Perhaps a deadly flu will jump from animals to humans. But it’s dangerous to assume that we know what form the next emergency will take.
We’d be smarter not to be reactive, focusing all our planning on a repeat of the coronavirus. Maybe we should focus our thinking on a wider range of possible crises. We should be trying to prevent terrorists from using bioweapons, or AI run amok, or accidental nuclear war, or asteroid strikes. I don’t know what the next global crisis will look like, but I very much doubt it will be a replay of the crisis of 2020.
Look for something totally unexpected, coming out of the blue.
And remember, the US government was almost completely unprepared, despite numerous warnings from experts.
READER COMMENTS
E. Harding
Apr 2 2020 at 8:32pm
Big reason I think this may not be the last such crisis: who’s getting fired for this?
E. Harding
Apr 2 2020 at 8:35pm
To answer my own question: the people doing the right thing will get fired for this. Outside China, the people who did the wrong thing will be promoted.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/captain-crozier-has-been-relieved-of-command/
Mark Bahner
Apr 2 2020 at 9:31pm
As I’ve said before, we are idiots. I’ll stand by that. 🙂
…BUT…and this is a big but…if we do have *everyone* in the U.S. wearing filter masks for in the next viral epidemic, it occurs to me that it would be possible for people to double-bag their masks, and send them to various locations for regeneration. And at those locations, it seems like it would potentially be possible to test both the outside and the inside of the mask for the problematic virus. But this analysis of the inside and especially the outside of masks for viral traces is perhaps a bit beyond our present technology.
So I’ll settle for simply everyone wearing masks. And washable gloves. And ideally a head sock. And some sort of face shield.
Good old inexpensive head sock. Just the thing for a viral epidemic.
And a face shield (I already bought one for the next epidemic)
With the face sock and the face shield, washable filter masks could probably be used (i.e., it probably would not be necessary to use disposable N95 respirators).
The total cost of the washable filter mask, washable gloves, head sock, and face shield? Probably less than $50 per person in the U.S….and that’s even with incompetent federal government procurement. So we’re talking about 330 million people x $50 = less than $20 billion! Now, the federal government just spent $2 trillion, and I doubt that includes even $1 billion for the type of measures I’m advocating. It just………….hurts me…………so much!
I agree we shouldn’t spend all our planning on a repeat. But we should spend some of our planning on the least expensive ways to prevent a repeat. I don’t think that the least expensive way is necessarily massive testing. Just look at what I’m proposing. It’s less than $20 billion to essentially protect virtually everyone in the U.S. Or everyone in the world for less than $400 billion.
Or think if simply everyone on international flights was required to wear them during times of pandemic. Wear them in the airport terminals, on the planes, and for 14 days afterward. Airline travel would not need to be curtailed at all. For about the same cost as checking a single bag round trip with most airlines. What a waste!
Scott Sumner
Apr 3 2020 at 1:39pm
I increasingly believe that the way to get our economy back up and running is to have people return to work with personal protection.
Mark Bahner
Apr 2 2020 at 9:41pm
Hi,
The software censors didn’t like my previous comments. I assume they’ll show up eventually. (My comments, not the software censors.) 🙂
I was not endorsing the head sock and face shields to which I linked. I was merely trying to demonstrate they’re not some pie-in-the-sky expensive future technology. They are dirt cheap options that are available in significant quantities this very day.
While we wait for my comments to show…I’ll just give the spoiler alert that I don’t think testing is necessarily the least expensive option. From my substantial experience as an environmental engineer, I’ll just tell you that pollution prevention…stopping pollution from ever being generated…is usually less expensive than controlling it after it has been generated.
The analogy in this situation is that it’s probably cheaper to prevent people from even being infected, rather than testing then treating massive numbers of people after they have been infected.
Thaomas
Apr 3 2020 at 8:21am
But it IS like the Great recession in that the Fed is again allowing aggregate demand to fall below aggregate supply. Not all the unemployment is due to people not being able to go to work or disruptions of input supplies. Consumption and investments are being postponed by people who are not income constrained. There is no supply-side reason the break-even TIPS spread should have fallen below ~ 2.5% except that traders expect the Fed to fail to keep NGDP growing exactly as it failed in 2008.
Mark Bahner
Apr 3 2020 at 12:14pm
Hi Scott,
My previous comments ignored your excellent point of another excellent post. I just wanted to keep driving home the point that simple and inexpensive measures–i.e., very inexpensive materials that anyone can use, to create barriers to viral transmission–could have saved literally trillions of dollars. In fact, they still could save at least hundreds of billions. There is no reason why virtually everyone in the U.S. could not be wearing a cloth mask (or simple scarf covering the mouth and nose) and washable gloves when in close proximity to other people in public. That could be done in the U.S. and everywhere. Today. (Or tomorrow, after people read this. ;-))
But getting back to your point:
Your statement about “terrorists using bioweapons” gets me thinking about a fairly believable scenario in which I can imagine over 100 million people dying. I won’t even hint at what that could be. I’m sure other people have had the idea, but I don’t want to give any group of crazy people ideas.
Accidental nuclear war scares me, too. It seems like it really would be a good idea to amend the Constitution to make it clear that a president should not have the authority to launch a preemptive nuclear strike without concurrence of at least some members of Congress. Or perhaps it would not take a Constitutional amendment, since the Constitution leaves the power to declare war to Congress. (We’ve ignored that power reserved to Congress since Jefferson…possibly even Washington…but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in the Constitution.)
Asteroid strikes don’t scare me much. Comets a little, but not asteroids. We know where virtually all the dinosaur-extinction-size asteroids are, and we’re greatly improving on even the small city killers pretty quickly.
AI run amok…I will tell about one thing that scares me: 25 years from now, virtually every vehicle on U.S. roads will be autonomous, owned by fleet owners. What if someone hacks the software to simultaneously have half the vehicles slam on the brakes, and the other half go to maximum acceleration? I don’t know anything about the software, so I have no idea how plausible it is, but in the U.S. alone, we could be talking about tens of millions of people simultaneously seriously injured or killed. And even getting to them with the roads jammed would be a mess. I only mention this scenario because I’ve mentioned it before, and because I now realize that that scenario pales in comparison to terrorists with bioweapons.
Finally, if we’re talking about AI with intelligence equivalent or superior to human intelligence, and the ability and means to reproduce itself, then if that AI “runs amok” we’re toast. We need clean air, we need clean water, we need sleep, we need food. AI robots need none of that. We wouldn’t stand a chance.
🙁
Scott Sumner
Apr 3 2020 at 1:41pm
In an earlier post, I mentioned the same issue with driverless cars.
Nick Ronalds
Apr 3 2020 at 2:47pm
Yes, certainly true. Generals always fighting the last war comes to mind. A crisis doesn’t become a crisis unless it’s unexpected, since steps are taken to avoid predictable problems. There likely will be another epidemic at some point but it could differ in important ways from this one. The Spanish flu, for example, killed people in their prime because it inflamed healthy immune systems. New scholarship indicates that the plague killed 60% of the population of Europe, not 1/3 as was thought. An epidemic generated by an antibiotic-resistant super-bacteria could make this virus seem quaint.
Mark Bahner
Apr 4 2020 at 10:10pm
The thing is, I have no confidence in the federal government–or state and local governments–actually learning enough to win the last war (COVID-19) if the exact same thing should happen next year. I think they’d still go with shutting down the whole economy via “social isolation.” To me, it seems blindingly obvious that very inexpensive measures could be employed with COVID-19 that would dramatically reduce transmission without requiring people to stay at home. I’m thinking in particular about washable filter masks, everyone wearing balaclavas/”head socks,” and everyone wearing washable gloves.
It seems to me that Japan’s COVID-19 experience to date shows the dramatic impact of simply using filter masks (and not doing a lot of hand-shaking, hugging, and cheek-kissing).
Brian Donohue
Apr 4 2020 at 2:10pm
Very cool. Great post.
Njnnja
Apr 5 2020 at 4:37pm
This is a great post. To a first degree approximation, the countries that did well with SARS-Cov-2 are the ones that got hit with SARS 1, across all sorts of government types, cultures, population density, etc. The countries that didn’t, didn’t. Again, across a wide array of governments, public health systems, etc.
Example truly is the school of mankind, and we will learn at no other, but at least we do learn.
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