Today, reading an article on how unprepared the world was for this pandemic, I thought back to an article that I posted back in 2019. It was about “black swan” events, or events that come out of nowhere. The example I used was that of the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and other places around it in 79 AD.
This is the quote from an article in “The Guardian” that made me reflect on the article that I had written previously.
“The global response to Sars-CoV-2 is the greatest science policy failure in a generation. The signals were clear. Hendra in 1994, Nipah in 1998, Sars in 2003, Mers in 2012 and Ebola in 2014; these major human epidemics were all caused by viruses that originated in animal hosts and crossed over into humans. Covid-19 is caused by a new variant of the same coronavirus that caused Sars.
That the warning signs went unheeded is unsurprising. Few of us have experienced a pandemic, and we are all guilty of ignoring information that doesn’t reflect our own experience of the world.“
Anyways here is the article again:
Predicting the Future: If it hasn’t happened yet, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
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