SARS was a huge sign that something like SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) was a significant risk. But, give it 10 years and I suspect research funding will once again be scarce until the next outbreak. It’s not about this disease so much as a reasonable response to a range of diseases like Ebola which easily and frequently make the jump to humans.
Should we spend some resources on Ebola? Of course. But those resources should be spent in line with the risks as we best understand them. By 2004 we already had evidence that coronaviruses were much more dangerous than Ebola, with the 2003/2004 SARS outbreak killing half as many people (774) as Ebola has in nearly 50 years. Ignoring COVID-19, SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses) have killed 1,640 people, exceeding Ebola’s grim toll.
It might be small _because_ we freak out about it. Kind of like New Zealand's COVID-19 numbers (or other countries with aggressive prevention / mitigation methods).
In comparing diseases we probably want to compare their transmission and mortality rates and long-term effects. If we compare their infection or death count then we're comparing the disease + the response together which muddies the waters a bit.
Right. Yes, a paper on coronaviruses described this as a "ticking time bomb". The interesting question is how many other papers around the same time used similar language for other diseases. Without that, you don't have any evidence that people made the wrong decision then based on what they knew at the time.
Even though, they were 200, the fact that one of them was identified correctly, saved human civilization as a whole.
The point being, 1 in 200 is not a bad success ratio per se
To put it another way: if you're making arbitrary predictions without explanations, then you increase the likelihood of a prediction coming true by increasing the number of predictions you make. But clearly we shouldn't value predictors simply based on the number of predictions they make.
Aside from 1918, the quarantine of entire cities and counties has been a common tactic to control plagues from bubonic to yellow fever. There are even reports from the Black Death of some Italian cities delivering food to peasants to encourage them to stay home.
30+ days mandatory quarantine wasn't unusual.
The word Quarantine traces it's roots back to quarantino (40 days) and those laws where passed all over the place from (what we know) the 14th Century.
Headache to much blood, leeches.
Stomach ache, too much blood to the stomach, leeches.
Besides, if your argument is that precedent doesn’t exist because medical technology was different, consider that we’re dealing with exactly the problem that quarantine was designed to fix: an infectious disease that we neither have immunity nor treatment for. For this exact scenario, the precedent is both strong and relevant.
1. It's hard to keep outbreaks localized, thanks to widely available air travel -- that's pretty new compared to 1918, but extremely common knowledge.
2. The standard procedure, for centuries now, has been lockdown / quarantine.
1+2=widespread lockdowns
Again, in his book, he says that pandemics are not black swans. Taleb used this knowledge to advise a fund that saw massive returns betting that all of this would happen:
https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/taleb-advised-univer...
you know what we can justify prospectively? any and all scientific research, including corona research and every past and future ig nobel nominee, over funneling billions of dollars into the pockets of the already wealthy, as our politicoeconomic system is currently set up to do.
that's not to belittle your point that you can't a priori know what research will "pay off", but rather to buttress the idea that we should be pouring many magnitudes more money into research so we're that much less likely to miss potentially valuable science in the face of the vast unknown.
However, an indexing strategy still requires an estimate of the value of coronavirus research. Suppose $5T USD was funneled into all research over the last 10 years. How much of that would virology/epidemiology have gotten, and would it have been enough?
Hard to answer exactly, but we can get a decent answer. A quick quack (search)[0] shows that in 2013 the US spent $435bn in research (We'll round to an even $500bn) funding. So to answer your question:
> How much of that would virology/epidemiology have gotten, and would it have been enough?
Exactly as much as they already got and in exactly the same way it has.
But this answers your question too specifically because it is just all funding. Personally I'm in the view that if we're not in an active war we should be focusing more money into R&D. Science has a ROI of 1 year - a few hundred years, with 20 years probably being around the mean. A 10-30 year investment is not something I want my industry to focus around (or something I can expect industry to even spend money on because their incentives are not aligned for that). But it IS something I want my country to be focused on, because even 50 years for a country is not that long. I also want that knowledge in the public domain so businesses can form around these new things. Essentially the gov raises the tide and all boats benefit, even the people that are making new boats. I want my government to be funding basic scientific research because often there is no immediate benefit from this but the long term benefits are huge. Institutions like NASA and CERN don't spin off technologies because there is something unique about them, they spin off technologies because they are pushing the edges of technological capabilities and have to invent new components along the way, things they didn't know they needed. This isn't something I can expect a company smaller than FAANG to invest in.
[0] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15330/nsf15330.pdf
[1] Further breakdown: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17316/
risk averse investors (?) may want a lot to go towards prevention of catastrophic but perhaps lower probability things (e.g. pandemic, asteroid impact within 1000 years), others may want towards high probability things (climate change related), yet others may want to just solve nuclear fusion so that all of the above become way easier, etc. imagine if $5T concentrated solely in energy research got us some breakthrough leading to cheap/infinite energy, for example.
prediction market? i'm not really sure.
with that said, once $5T (or whatever) is allocated to science, it's a matter for the decision markets in and around science to sort out allocation within. that mechanism has the best chance of coming up with the best available (but unlikely perfect) answer.
Without knowing the future, you can't make this statement.
That's what makes covid nightmare fuel, a virus that can be entirely asymptomatic in one person but hit like a train on another that has a long incubation/shedding period.
Many emergent viruses are under close surveillance and animal vaccines are under development. Sometimes that alone makes economic sense already, e.g. when you want to protect expensive race horses from dying.
The danger of new viruses will only increase in coming years as we 1. travel far more than we used to, taking viruses with us and 2. go into the environments previously inhabited by wild animals like bats (which are a host for a large number of viurses).
Meat markets like the one where this pandemic is believed to have started? Not so much.
When we're through this thing, there darn well better be treaties on the table that require the reduction and elimination of trade in untested disease-carrying animals.
Citation needed
The entire quote which this article branches on reads:
> “The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic animals in southern China, is a time bomb.”
I'd say that the second part of that statement carries more importance then the exact type of virus and the specific research on that type.
I'm no virologist, but if the barrage of news from the last few months have taught me anything, it's that the actions of humans are a big factor in increasing the probability of any type of outbreak. Sure, researching specific families and types of viruses gives us valuable insights. But in and of themselves, tying that knowledge into a larger interdisciplinary framework and translating that then into socio-economic policies, safety guidelines, legal frameworks,... is really important.
Going back to the quote above, this Vox piece does a great job explaining that side of the equation:
In short, yes. Wet, wildlife markets in China were the source of this outbreak.