Much of why parts of the East were much more effective at stopping that deadly first wave of COVID has been attributed to their experience with SARS and how that primed them to prepare for just such a scenario. This even amounted to changing laws, like South Korea’s that allowed the government to contact trace in a pandemic.
I haven’t seen any such actions here in response to the much more deadly SARS-CoV-2, and it’s disconcerting.
That said, the classic comparison of our reactions to terrorism is completely expected: Terrorism explicitly intends to incite, to spread fear, to occupy our minds. Pandemics have the exact opposite inclination — the less we take them seriously, the more they are free to spread.
9/11 showed me that I had no understanding of the country I was living in. I remember distinctly at the time thinking that it was nice and solidaristic that people were flying the American flag. I remember reading Katha Pollitt's column where she recounts berating her daughter for wanting to fly the American flag outside their window, calling it - I don't remember the exact words, but the flag of imperialism, war-mongering, etc. I thought that was so over-the-top, but she was 100% right and I was 100% clueless. Now nothing disgusts me more than 9/11 rhetoric.
Pandemics have happened before. They will happen again. While some people have argued that climate change and deforestation is likely to result in more pandemics, as a nonexpert I remain unconvinced - the number of people having direct interactions with animals is if anything likely to decline as agriculture becomes increasingly mechanised in the rest of the world, and cold chains make their way into the remaining places were they do not currently extend.
So there is absolutely no reason to think that pandemics on the scale of covid-19 are coming down the pike every five years or so. Another pandemic could happen tomorrow - the pandemic dice have essentially no memory. But I think it's reasonable to assume that global pandemics of this magnitude won't be a thing we're dealing with every few years.
By contrast, there was every reason to assume the worst about 9/11 - a small group of dedicated terrorists had figured out how to murder thousands of Americans, and it wasn't (and still isn't) hard to dream up plausible ways in which this could be repeated. As you say, that assumption was wrong. But it wasn't totally unreasonable.
*However*, while pandemics are rare, I think we can all agree that this one has been consequential enough that we collectively should invest a heck of a lot of effort into reducing the risk and consequences of another one.
And luckily we've learned a lot about things we can do on both counts.
One relatively straightforward (if expensive) mitigation that sensible governments of rich-enough countries will make is ensuring indoor air quality standards are much improved.
Another thing that we could do is invest in a flexible disease testing infrastructure on a massive scale. Despite the CDC's screwup, we can develop tests for novel viruses within days if needs be; if we could deploy that on a scale that everybody in the country could be tested very regularly during a pandemic *and* isolate those people who test positive, it's going to be pretty damned hard for a respiratory virus of any sort to make much progress (though it has to be very regular because things like flu have a very short incubation period).
The other thing we can and should do (carefully!) is go out and look for other potential pandemic viruses and develop candidate vaccines and therapies for them. We were lucky that research on coronaviruses had identified the spike protein as the thing for a vaccine to target; we should try and do the same - or more - for as many of the other potential pandemic respiratory viruses as we can. Additionally, if we could identify a bunch of candidate drugs that inhibit those viruses, perhaps even run some of them to the point of Phase 1 trials, we'll have a massive head start on the next pandemic.
That said, the USA has a fairly unique problem with pandemic response with a substantial fraction of its population seemingly prepared to die to own the libs. Dunno what you can do about that.
You said on twitter that 9/11 gave Bush such popularity that he was less constrained than recent US presidents have been and that he used that opportunity poorly.
This is obviously true but I always wonder- would President Al Gore have invaded Iraq? I'm not sure, but I'm not as confident the answer would be "no" as a lot of my friends. I'm very confident President Kerry or President Hillary Clinton or President McCain would have invaded Iraq. Bush has buck-stops-here responsibility for that disaster, but our establishment as a whole really wanted that war. Bush is gone, the pro-intervention establishment is still in place, including in the Democratic Party and the NYT foreign desk.
As to Bush's domestic policy, it is sort of a wash and no worse than what happened under Clinton or Carter. The prescription drugs thing was good, the 2008 financial crisis was a bipartisan disaster (Clinton was the one who repealed Glass-Steagall), the failed attempt to privatise social security worked out well (both Bill Clinton and Obama might have been tempted to do something like that as a bipartisan deal), if Roe vs. Wade is overturned that will in part be the fault of idiot snooty Ivy League Democrats not jumping at the chance to confirm Harriet Miers. It turns out we could afford the tax cuts because Dick Cheney was right about deficits not mattering.
By the way, I've been meaning to bring this up with the hive mind: what's the deal with lack of temperature testing in the US? Or am I mistaken (and frequent temperature checks are indeed done)? And what about those of you in Europe: does one's temperature frequently get checked in some European countries before being admitted into (say) a mall or an office building or a university campus?
I spent most of 2020 back home in the States, and I don't recall ever having my temperature checked, although it's possible I'm forgetting one or two instances (I did take a couple of domestic flights after the pandemic's arrival).
Here in China, there's quite a bit of temperature checking. Often a security guard will tap your hand with a digital thermometer—or installed scanning machinery will do it—at the entrance to a public, indoor facility. I'm not really sure how much good it does. But as a very basic screening tool and first line of defense, it does seem like a common sense idea, in that it's not that invasive, and it's potentially pretty cheap (those little digital thermometers cost what, twelve bucks?).
"A digital thermometer is the most accurate and quickest way to take a temperature. Digital thermometers are available in most drug stores and supermarket pharmacies. Depending on where you shop, a digital thermometer can cost from $6 to $20."
I don't think the point is perfect accuracy. I think the point is, it's a quick, cheap and effective way to screen large number of people entering an indoor space where it's easy for a transmitting person to infect others. People can potentially game it via acetaminophen. And obviously some infected persons are either wholly asymptomatic and/or aren't exhibiting elevated body temperature. So, nothing's perfect. But doing lots of little (and often easy, cheap) things can add up to a larger benefit.
Anyway, given the virus's endemicity in the US, using temperature screening as a basic, first line of defense is probably moot. But maybe it would have been a good idea had the US started in March, 2020.
I don't understand this. People with fevers will mostly stay home without being asked or required to do so. The real danger, as I see it, is people who are infected asymptomatically or who haven't yet experienced symptoms. Temperature screening does nothing about that.
It's not complicated. People can have elevated temperatures without feeling particularly ill. Also, people who aren't feeling so great have been known to ignore how they're feeling in order to go to work or do their errands or what have you. I don't have numbers on how effective this particular tool is, but my observation (I've been back in Beijing since October) is that there's no "brilliant insight" that sets this country's covid strategy apart; rather, they're just very, very thorough and do lots of little things. I'd guess if temp-screening weren't effective, they'd have jettisoned it.
I should add: not all persons infected with covid exhibit elevated temperature. So, temperature screening doesn't flag everybody (just some!): it's about differences (protective measures) *at the margin*. Also, covid has long been so endemic in many countries that maybe it truly would be nonsensical to utilize this strategy in such places. But China has seen very limited community transmission for the past fifteen months.
Those hardened cockpit doors also made an airliner mass-murder crash possible:
"The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion."
"All 144 passengers and six crew members were killed."
You are not mistaken. Terrorist acts and their moral equivalent have occurred throughout history, creating terror but not causing mass casualties. Pandemics, which have also occurred throughout history, have been perhaps the single greatest cause of mass casualties. We have not seen the last pandemic.
If I was betting, I'd say a cyberattack is most likely to be next attack on the US that has an impact comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, in leaving us shocked, alarmed and angry at how unprepared and caught by surprise we were.
And how to respond to a cyberattack that seriously disrupts civilian life is ambiguous, assuming it's even clear who to hold responsible- should it be met only in kind, with a cyber counterattack, with bombs and missiles, economic sanctions, etc?
It seems likely that a scared and angry US public would get behind some tragic miscalculations and errors of judgment as far as our response to that situation.
SO MUCH THIS. Our government and corporate actors do not take cyber-security seriously, even a little bit, and the cyber-security industry has been weakened through exploitation by profiteers.
>>>I hope I’ll be wrong again, this time about pandemics. But I worry.<<<
In my view by far the worry that's most unjustifiably under the radar (that is, people should be a lot more concerned) is nuclear war. I'm old enough to remember the Cold War, and during that time most folks tended to regard an actual USSR-USA shooting war as unthinkable (not literally so, of course, lots of people get paid to think about things like this!) in that it would likely lead to a nuclear exchange.
In recent years we've seen a terrifying (to me, at least, though I sometimes feel like I'm screaming in the in the middle of the forest where no one can hear) increase in geopolitical tension in the Indo-Pacific. One of these days some general somewhere is going to get trigger happy.
It seems like we had a window in the 1990s to *really* do something substantive to minimize the probability of a nuclear holocaust. But we squandered the opportunity. And so here we are back where we started at just about the time Gorbachev came to power.
You piqued my curiosity (was I using "unthinkable" incorrectly?). Webster's says the word means:
unthinkable
1: not capable of being grasped by the mind
2: being contrary to what is reasonable, desirable, or probable : being out of the question
So yeah, that's my recollection (and I said "most" not "all"). YMMV.
What I was really getting at is: I don't get the same vibe WRT discussions of China/USA conflict. A lot of people seem to talk **casually** about a shooting war between the two superpowers these days in a manner that wasn't present in the 80s—it's as if they're unaware the PRC has a highly lethal and growing nuclear arsenal. In a word, Americans (worryingly) aren't as terrified at the prospect of a Sino-US hot war as they were of Soviet-US hot war. And that's not good. Because fear is a good motivator. In the 80s there was a robust disarmament movement. There were protests. There was a lot of worried discussion about the doomsday clock getting closer to midnight. And there was concern in officialdom, too. And eventually that concern translated into a relaxation in Cold War tensions and big cuts (though not big enough) in nuclear arsenals.
We're sleepwalking into very dangerous times, I'm afraid.
Out of curiosity, what do you rate the odds of a conventional PRC-USA military conflict breaking out? Imagine, say, Xi ordering the PLA to take Taiwan. Does a US president order the Pentagon to defend that island with US forces? Or not? And there are other scenarios, too: most likely a naval confrontation in the South China Sea that—perhaps via a miscalculation at the command level—goes "hot" and before you know it either the US or the PRC has had some ships sunk and a bunch of sailors killed. Surely it's vanishingly unlikely that either the US or the Chinese would launch a nuclear first strike. That's effectively signing a national suicide note. But the chances of a "conventional" war breaking out strikes me as worryingly high. That is my fear (because in such a situation there's surely a non-zero chance either side would be very tempted to use its most powerful weapons system if it felt the war were going badly).
Wouldn't this be the first shooting war directly between two nuclear powers? I tend to think there is a logic in this, that nuclear weapons suppress wars between Great Powers.
How vulnerable is China to a naval blockade? Is it self sufficient in food and energy like the US? I don’t believe it is. Would the Chinese public see empty supermarket shelves and a cratering economy as a sign that the CCP has lost the Mandate of Heaven?
One thing I hope we get is better infectious disease surveillance. That means I want to be able to check the weather site for the current local flu case count report, the way I can check up pollen conditions. If there’s a bad flu outbreak like 2017-18, and it’s bad in my area, I want to get a “flu outbreak warning” or “flu outbreak watch”, the way I get “winter storm warnings” or “tornado watches”.
Just like most of these weather warnings, most of these public health warnings should come with no mandatory conditions, unless things get especially bad. But telling me when it would be good and prosocial to wear a mask or move my meeting to Zoom seems like it would be nice.
The last thing I want to see is a covid version of TSA and Patriot Act. However, it would be nice if there was a serious effort to determine whether or not a stupid lab accident killed millions of people.
Why is that important? I mean, we have plenty of evidence that lab leaks happen and we have good reasons to believe that lab leaks can have catastrophic results, both of which imply we should improve lab safety across the board. The correct policy doesn't change that much whether or not COVID was the result of a lab leak.
Personally I had no idea that deadly lab accidents were so common until recently. And the fact that one may have happened (and perhaps covered up) ,which shut down the world and killed millions absolutely should lead to substantial policy changes.
I think COVID has raised the salience of lab leaks. But whether COVID itself leaked from a lab or not, the correct policy is to institute tighter biosafety in research labs. If we got proof tomorrow that COVID had nothing to do with any lab, we should still significantly improve biosafety standards.
More correctly, the CCP allowed a billion people to raise themselves out of the poverty that the CCP had imposed on them for decades.
Extra comedy points, however, for describing the Great Chinese Famine as a “rough start.” As Mao himself said, “Black humor is like food: Not everyone gets it.”
I think comparing the CCP against an autocratic government that ran from the 17th century to the 19th century is setting a very low bar. A more reasonable comparison is against what the ROC was able to accomplish in Taiwan. If China had been able to have the same level of growth that Taiwan had since 1948 it would have an economy of 40 trillion dollars instead of the 16 trillion it current has.
Taiwan was considerably wealthier than mainland China at the end of WW2. It had been ruled by a modern industrial power for decades. And it had seen almost no fighting during the war (and so its infrastructure was intact). It also largely escaped the ravages of the 1945-1949 fighting on the mainland. In short, Taiwan was wealthier and in much better shape than mainland China at the time of the founding of the PRC.
Now, there's little doubt that the grave errors of the CCP with respect to economic policy played a role in Chinese poverty over the next three decades (and ROC economic policy quite the opposite). But I'd say a fairer comparison, given the above, is between the PRC and India. The latter has narrowed the gap with China a bit in recent years. And I hope continues to do so (I'm personally predicting a crash in PRC growth rates over the next decade). But there's no denying that, at present, China is a lot richer than India.
I never, ever shared my countrymen's hysteria post-9/11, and actually never even understood it. I lived in Europe during the 1990s, and terrorism was a regular thing in France and the UK and other places. I flew out of Heathrow in March 1994 while the IRA was mortaring the runways. In Paris when the Metro was bombed by Algerians, the authorities would close the affected station and continue operations as usual. This, I believed, was the correct response to terrorism; anything else, to repeat a cliche, was letting the terrorists win. Terrorism was simply another of many lethal risks we accept every day, and never a very likely risk for any particular individual.
When 9/11 occurred I was airborne, flying from the US to London, and first learned about the attack when walking down the High Street in Richmond I saw the photos on the newsracks. My reaction was, "Well, I guess it was about time." A major attack on the US was inevitable, as far as I was concerned (it was also instantly obvious the same modus operandi could never again be employed for subsequent attacks, which made the erection of a vast security apparatus to defend against similar attacks seem . . . bizarre).
And I waited a week for global air travel to resume so I could get back home. Stop all air travel around the world for a week? Not an overreaction at all!
Somehow I felt no more vulnerable post-9/11 than I did before, since I'd been more or less living with terrorism alongside millions of British and French people for years. I never believed the US was somehow "special," with some kind of native immunity from terrorism; it was simply a matter of time.
Also, I didn't think terrorism could really be effectively prevented in a free society, if that society wanted to remain free. Pretty quickly it became evident that Americans were happy to jettison, wholesale, hard-won freedoms in the wake of 9/11, and were even eager to repeat all the mistakes of Vietnam by invading Afghanistan. I never understood it, and could only goggle incredulously when, after asking an airline worker why I could no longer mail a letter from inside an American airport, the response was, "Because of 9/11!", as if I was a child asking why adult dogs were so much bigger than puppies.
One of the the saddest aspects of the post 9/11 world, to me, was how the British, who had stoically maintained their dignity throughout the Troubles, and the French as well, lost their collective shit along with the Americans. It was as if American fear and neurosis infected an otherwise well-adjusted polity on the other side of the Atlantic.
Twenty years on, our hysterical overreaction to a viral pandemic is no longer surprising.
I was really disappointed with how rapidly US hysteria spread around the world. Even more annoying is that European airport security decided to actually take the insane fantasies of the US seriously and make a genuine effort to prevent the sort of nonsense TSA was cosplaying at preventing. As a result, European airport security is way more onerous than US airport security.
I recall being told by countless private security guards and even public officials that I couldn’t take photos of this or that thing, because terrorism. My response was invariably some version of, “Don’t be absurd,” and to go on taking photos.
Would a COVID Commission modeled on the 9/11 Commission be useful? Obviously it depends on who gets picked to be on the staff, but I feel like we've had a problem with there being too many disparate narratives (I'm talking about among non-denialists) and an inability to prioritize what would be the most effective steps in preventing this from happening again.
It looks like we really did fund gain of function research in China. Doesn’t mean the epidemic started with a lab leak! But it seems like we should have a conversation about that kind of research being performed in relatively low security labs, or being performed at all.
Are we even capable of having these conversations? I feel like this news should be receiving at least as much attention as the Ivermectin overdose panic. What’s wrong with us?
It’s difficult to think of how you could staff such a commission to really dig in, no matter where the facts lead. I really don’t think we’re up to it, and that’s depressing. I think it would be wonderful to have an effort similar to the 9/11 commission’s.
Well, if we think a well-run commission would be helpful, then I'd rather try and fail than give up preemptively.
I'm all for a commission looking into whatever happened in China, but that's only one of a huge range of topics where a commission could provide helpful insight. Like, what could the CDC have done better? How can we make vaccine production even faster next time? Should the pandemic response team be made into a permanent executive branch office so the staff can't just be fired for no reason? Why did the public health community misunderstand the aerosols issue and how can that kind of thing be prevented next time? What are the best long-run ways to reduce opposition to vaccines in the future? Etc.
100% agreed here. I think COVID could just as easily have had a 10% fatality rate like SARS, or God forbid, a 34% fatality rate like MERS.
We need to have the testing capacity, and PPE capacity in place for WHEN something like that happens.
Not to mention, continue to pump money into R&D so that we can deploy life saving vaccines early.
Oh, and stop wet markets,
Much of why parts of the East were much more effective at stopping that deadly first wave of COVID has been attributed to their experience with SARS and how that primed them to prepare for just such a scenario. This even amounted to changing laws, like South Korea’s that allowed the government to contact trace in a pandemic.
I haven’t seen any such actions here in response to the much more deadly SARS-CoV-2, and it’s disconcerting.
That said, the classic comparison of our reactions to terrorism is completely expected: Terrorism explicitly intends to incite, to spread fear, to occupy our minds. Pandemics have the exact opposite inclination — the less we take them seriously, the more they are free to spread.
9/11 showed me that I had no understanding of the country I was living in. I remember distinctly at the time thinking that it was nice and solidaristic that people were flying the American flag. I remember reading Katha Pollitt's column where she recounts berating her daughter for wanting to fly the American flag outside their window, calling it - I don't remember the exact words, but the flag of imperialism, war-mongering, etc. I thought that was so over-the-top, but she was 100% right and I was 100% clueless. Now nothing disgusts me more than 9/11 rhetoric.
Pandemics have happened before. They will happen again. While some people have argued that climate change and deforestation is likely to result in more pandemics, as a nonexpert I remain unconvinced - the number of people having direct interactions with animals is if anything likely to decline as agriculture becomes increasingly mechanised in the rest of the world, and cold chains make their way into the remaining places were they do not currently extend.
So there is absolutely no reason to think that pandemics on the scale of covid-19 are coming down the pike every five years or so. Another pandemic could happen tomorrow - the pandemic dice have essentially no memory. But I think it's reasonable to assume that global pandemics of this magnitude won't be a thing we're dealing with every few years.
By contrast, there was every reason to assume the worst about 9/11 - a small group of dedicated terrorists had figured out how to murder thousands of Americans, and it wasn't (and still isn't) hard to dream up plausible ways in which this could be repeated. As you say, that assumption was wrong. But it wasn't totally unreasonable.
*However*, while pandemics are rare, I think we can all agree that this one has been consequential enough that we collectively should invest a heck of a lot of effort into reducing the risk and consequences of another one.
And luckily we've learned a lot about things we can do on both counts.
One relatively straightforward (if expensive) mitigation that sensible governments of rich-enough countries will make is ensuring indoor air quality standards are much improved.
Another thing that we could do is invest in a flexible disease testing infrastructure on a massive scale. Despite the CDC's screwup, we can develop tests for novel viruses within days if needs be; if we could deploy that on a scale that everybody in the country could be tested very regularly during a pandemic *and* isolate those people who test positive, it's going to be pretty damned hard for a respiratory virus of any sort to make much progress (though it has to be very regular because things like flu have a very short incubation period).
The other thing we can and should do (carefully!) is go out and look for other potential pandemic viruses and develop candidate vaccines and therapies for them. We were lucky that research on coronaviruses had identified the spike protein as the thing for a vaccine to target; we should try and do the same - or more - for as many of the other potential pandemic respiratory viruses as we can. Additionally, if we could identify a bunch of candidate drugs that inhibit those viruses, perhaps even run some of them to the point of Phase 1 trials, we'll have a massive head start on the next pandemic.
That said, the USA has a fairly unique problem with pandemic response with a substantial fraction of its population seemingly prepared to die to own the libs. Dunno what you can do about that.
You said on twitter that 9/11 gave Bush such popularity that he was less constrained than recent US presidents have been and that he used that opportunity poorly.
This is obviously true but I always wonder- would President Al Gore have invaded Iraq? I'm not sure, but I'm not as confident the answer would be "no" as a lot of my friends. I'm very confident President Kerry or President Hillary Clinton or President McCain would have invaded Iraq. Bush has buck-stops-here responsibility for that disaster, but our establishment as a whole really wanted that war. Bush is gone, the pro-intervention establishment is still in place, including in the Democratic Party and the NYT foreign desk.
As to Bush's domestic policy, it is sort of a wash and no worse than what happened under Clinton or Carter. The prescription drugs thing was good, the 2008 financial crisis was a bipartisan disaster (Clinton was the one who repealed Glass-Steagall), the failed attempt to privatise social security worked out well (both Bill Clinton and Obama might have been tempted to do something like that as a bipartisan deal), if Roe vs. Wade is overturned that will in part be the fault of idiot snooty Ivy League Democrats not jumping at the chance to confirm Harriet Miers. It turns out we could afford the tax cuts because Dick Cheney was right about deficits not mattering.
By the way, I've been meaning to bring this up with the hive mind: what's the deal with lack of temperature testing in the US? Or am I mistaken (and frequent temperature checks are indeed done)? And what about those of you in Europe: does one's temperature frequently get checked in some European countries before being admitted into (say) a mall or an office building or a university campus?
I spent most of 2020 back home in the States, and I don't recall ever having my temperature checked, although it's possible I'm forgetting one or two instances (I did take a couple of domestic flights after the pandemic's arrival).
Here in China, there's quite a bit of temperature checking. Often a security guard will tap your hand with a digital thermometer—or installed scanning machinery will do it—at the entrance to a public, indoor facility. I'm not really sure how much good it does. But as a very basic screening tool and first line of defense, it does seem like a common sense idea, in that it's not that invasive, and it's potentially pretty cheap (those little digital thermometers cost what, twelve bucks?).
Cleveland Clinic disagrees with your nurses:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/9959-thermometers-how-to-take-your-temperature
"A digital thermometer is the most accurate and quickest way to take a temperature. Digital thermometers are available in most drug stores and supermarket pharmacies. Depending on where you shop, a digital thermometer can cost from $6 to $20."
I don't think the point is perfect accuracy. I think the point is, it's a quick, cheap and effective way to screen large number of people entering an indoor space where it's easy for a transmitting person to infect others. People can potentially game it via acetaminophen. And obviously some infected persons are either wholly asymptomatic and/or aren't exhibiting elevated body temperature. So, nothing's perfect. But doing lots of little (and often easy, cheap) things can add up to a larger benefit.
Anyway, given the virus's endemicity in the US, using temperature screening as a basic, first line of defense is probably moot. But maybe it would have been a good idea had the US started in March, 2020.
I don't understand this. People with fevers will mostly stay home without being asked or required to do so. The real danger, as I see it, is people who are infected asymptomatically or who haven't yet experienced symptoms. Temperature screening does nothing about that.
It's not complicated. People can have elevated temperatures without feeling particularly ill. Also, people who aren't feeling so great have been known to ignore how they're feeling in order to go to work or do their errands or what have you. I don't have numbers on how effective this particular tool is, but my observation (I've been back in Beijing since October) is that there's no "brilliant insight" that sets this country's covid strategy apart; rather, they're just very, very thorough and do lots of little things. I'd guess if temp-screening weren't effective, they'd have jettisoned it.
I should add: not all persons infected with covid exhibit elevated temperature. So, temperature screening doesn't flag everybody (just some!): it's about differences (protective measures) *at the margin*. Also, covid has long been so endemic in many countries that maybe it truly would be nonsensical to utilize this strategy in such places. But China has seen very limited community transmission for the past fifteen months.
Why are we not seeing PSA's about getting vaccinated the way there used to be about smocking and drugs?
We do, in New York City at least.
Those hardened cockpit doors also made an airliner mass-murder crash possible:
"The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion."
"All 144 passengers and six crew members were killed."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
You are not mistaken. Terrorist acts and their moral equivalent have occurred throughout history, creating terror but not causing mass casualties. Pandemics, which have also occurred throughout history, have been perhaps the single greatest cause of mass casualties. We have not seen the last pandemic.
If I was betting, I'd say a cyberattack is most likely to be next attack on the US that has an impact comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, in leaving us shocked, alarmed and angry at how unprepared and caught by surprise we were.
And how to respond to a cyberattack that seriously disrupts civilian life is ambiguous, assuming it's even clear who to hold responsible- should it be met only in kind, with a cyber counterattack, with bombs and missiles, economic sanctions, etc?
It seems likely that a scared and angry US public would get behind some tragic miscalculations and errors of judgment as far as our response to that situation.
SO MUCH THIS. Our government and corporate actors do not take cyber-security seriously, even a little bit, and the cyber-security industry has been weakened through exploitation by profiteers.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-to-get-rich-sabotaging-nuclear
This is a good post. I really don’t have anything to add or haggle about.
>>>I hope I’ll be wrong again, this time about pandemics. But I worry.<<<
In my view by far the worry that's most unjustifiably under the radar (that is, people should be a lot more concerned) is nuclear war. I'm old enough to remember the Cold War, and during that time most folks tended to regard an actual USSR-USA shooting war as unthinkable (not literally so, of course, lots of people get paid to think about things like this!) in that it would likely lead to a nuclear exchange.
In recent years we've seen a terrifying (to me, at least, though I sometimes feel like I'm screaming in the in the middle of the forest where no one can hear) increase in geopolitical tension in the Indo-Pacific. One of these days some general somewhere is going to get trigger happy.
It seems like we had a window in the 1990s to *really* do something substantive to minimize the probability of a nuclear holocaust. But we squandered the opportunity. And so here we are back where we started at just about the time Gorbachev came to power.
“ during that time most folks tended to regard an actual USSR-USA shooting war as unthinkable ”
That’s totally not accurate. A lot of people felt it was a matter of when not if.
You piqued my curiosity (was I using "unthinkable" incorrectly?). Webster's says the word means:
unthinkable
1: not capable of being grasped by the mind
2: being contrary to what is reasonable, desirable, or probable : being out of the question
So yeah, that's my recollection (and I said "most" not "all"). YMMV.
What I was really getting at is: I don't get the same vibe WRT discussions of China/USA conflict. A lot of people seem to talk **casually** about a shooting war between the two superpowers these days in a manner that wasn't present in the 80s—it's as if they're unaware the PRC has a highly lethal and growing nuclear arsenal. In a word, Americans (worryingly) aren't as terrified at the prospect of a Sino-US hot war as they were of Soviet-US hot war. And that's not good. Because fear is a good motivator. In the 80s there was a robust disarmament movement. There were protests. There was a lot of worried discussion about the doomsday clock getting closer to midnight. And there was concern in officialdom, too. And eventually that concern translated into a relaxation in Cold War tensions and big cuts (though not big enough) in nuclear arsenals.
We're sleepwalking into very dangerous times, I'm afraid.
I doubt the US and China would have a nuclear exchange. India and Pakistan on the other hand…
Out of curiosity, what do you rate the odds of a conventional PRC-USA military conflict breaking out? Imagine, say, Xi ordering the PLA to take Taiwan. Does a US president order the Pentagon to defend that island with US forces? Or not? And there are other scenarios, too: most likely a naval confrontation in the South China Sea that—perhaps via a miscalculation at the command level—goes "hot" and before you know it either the US or the PRC has had some ships sunk and a bunch of sailors killed. Surely it's vanishingly unlikely that either the US or the Chinese would launch a nuclear first strike. That's effectively signing a national suicide note. But the chances of a "conventional" war breaking out strikes me as worryingly high. That is my fear (because in such a situation there's surely a non-zero chance either side would be very tempted to use its most powerful weapons system if it felt the war were going badly).
Wouldn't this be the first shooting war directly between two nuclear powers? I tend to think there is a logic in this, that nuclear weapons suppress wars between Great Powers.
How vulnerable is China to a naval blockade? Is it self sufficient in food and energy like the US? I don’t believe it is. Would the Chinese public see empty supermarket shelves and a cratering economy as a sign that the CCP has lost the Mandate of Heaven?
One thing I hope we get is better infectious disease surveillance. That means I want to be able to check the weather site for the current local flu case count report, the way I can check up pollen conditions. If there’s a bad flu outbreak like 2017-18, and it’s bad in my area, I want to get a “flu outbreak warning” or “flu outbreak watch”, the way I get “winter storm warnings” or “tornado watches”.
Just like most of these weather warnings, most of these public health warnings should come with no mandatory conditions, unless things get especially bad. But telling me when it would be good and prosocial to wear a mask or move my meeting to Zoom seems like it would be nice.
The last thing I want to see is a covid version of TSA and Patriot Act. However, it would be nice if there was a serious effort to determine whether or not a stupid lab accident killed millions of people.
Why is that important? I mean, we have plenty of evidence that lab leaks happen and we have good reasons to believe that lab leaks can have catastrophic results, both of which imply we should improve lab safety across the board. The correct policy doesn't change that much whether or not COVID was the result of a lab leak.
Personally I had no idea that deadly lab accidents were so common until recently. And the fact that one may have happened (and perhaps covered up) ,which shut down the world and killed millions absolutely should lead to substantial policy changes.
I think COVID has raised the salience of lab leaks. But whether COVID itself leaked from a lab or not, the correct policy is to institute tighter biosafety in research labs. If we got proof tomorrow that COVID had nothing to do with any lab, we should still significantly improve biosafety standards.
It would be nice if all rational people finally realized and admitted that the Chinese Communist Party is what it is: evil.
The CCP has, after an admittedly rough start, raised a billion people out of abject poverty.
"Rough start". Quite an understatement!
More correctly, the CCP allowed a billion people to raise themselves out of the poverty that the CCP had imposed on them for decades.
Extra comedy points, however, for describing the Great Chinese Famine as a “rough start.” As Mao himself said, “Black humor is like food: Not everyone gets it.”
There were plenty of famines in China under various imperial dynasties. And when Puyi abdicated in 1912 China was a very poor very backward country.
I think comparing the CCP against an autocratic government that ran from the 17th century to the 19th century is setting a very low bar. A more reasonable comparison is against what the ROC was able to accomplish in Taiwan. If China had been able to have the same level of growth that Taiwan had since 1948 it would have an economy of 40 trillion dollars instead of the 16 trillion it current has.
Taiwan was considerably wealthier than mainland China at the end of WW2. It had been ruled by a modern industrial power for decades. And it had seen almost no fighting during the war (and so its infrastructure was intact). It also largely escaped the ravages of the 1945-1949 fighting on the mainland. In short, Taiwan was wealthier and in much better shape than mainland China at the time of the founding of the PRC.
Now, there's little doubt that the grave errors of the CCP with respect to economic policy played a role in Chinese poverty over the next three decades (and ROC economic policy quite the opposite). But I'd say a fairer comparison, given the above, is between the PRC and India. The latter has narrowed the gap with China a bit in recent years. And I hope continues to do so (I'm personally predicting a crash in PRC growth rates over the next decade). But there's no denying that, at present, China is a lot richer than India.
“Communists: Only somewhat worse than imperial rule.”
Put that on a bumper sticker.
It’s turned out to be much much better than Imperial rule.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
To paraphrase Mike Myers, my view of the CCP is that it's semi-evil. Quasi-evil. The Diet Coke of evil.
I never, ever shared my countrymen's hysteria post-9/11, and actually never even understood it. I lived in Europe during the 1990s, and terrorism was a regular thing in France and the UK and other places. I flew out of Heathrow in March 1994 while the IRA was mortaring the runways. In Paris when the Metro was bombed by Algerians, the authorities would close the affected station and continue operations as usual. This, I believed, was the correct response to terrorism; anything else, to repeat a cliche, was letting the terrorists win. Terrorism was simply another of many lethal risks we accept every day, and never a very likely risk for any particular individual.
When 9/11 occurred I was airborne, flying from the US to London, and first learned about the attack when walking down the High Street in Richmond I saw the photos on the newsracks. My reaction was, "Well, I guess it was about time." A major attack on the US was inevitable, as far as I was concerned (it was also instantly obvious the same modus operandi could never again be employed for subsequent attacks, which made the erection of a vast security apparatus to defend against similar attacks seem . . . bizarre).
And I waited a week for global air travel to resume so I could get back home. Stop all air travel around the world for a week? Not an overreaction at all!
Somehow I felt no more vulnerable post-9/11 than I did before, since I'd been more or less living with terrorism alongside millions of British and French people for years. I never believed the US was somehow "special," with some kind of native immunity from terrorism; it was simply a matter of time.
Also, I didn't think terrorism could really be effectively prevented in a free society, if that society wanted to remain free. Pretty quickly it became evident that Americans were happy to jettison, wholesale, hard-won freedoms in the wake of 9/11, and were even eager to repeat all the mistakes of Vietnam by invading Afghanistan. I never understood it, and could only goggle incredulously when, after asking an airline worker why I could no longer mail a letter from inside an American airport, the response was, "Because of 9/11!", as if I was a child asking why adult dogs were so much bigger than puppies.
One of the the saddest aspects of the post 9/11 world, to me, was how the British, who had stoically maintained their dignity throughout the Troubles, and the French as well, lost their collective shit along with the Americans. It was as if American fear and neurosis infected an otherwise well-adjusted polity on the other side of the Atlantic.
Twenty years on, our hysterical overreaction to a viral pandemic is no longer surprising.
I was really disappointed with how rapidly US hysteria spread around the world. Even more annoying is that European airport security decided to actually take the insane fantasies of the US seriously and make a genuine effort to prevent the sort of nonsense TSA was cosplaying at preventing. As a result, European airport security is way more onerous than US airport security.
"Because of 9/11!"
I recall being told by countless private security guards and even public officials that I couldn’t take photos of this or that thing, because terrorism. My response was invariably some version of, “Don’t be absurd,” and to go on taking photos.
Would a COVID Commission modeled on the 9/11 Commission be useful? Obviously it depends on who gets picked to be on the staff, but I feel like we've had a problem with there being too many disparate narratives (I'm talking about among non-denialists) and an inability to prioritize what would be the most effective steps in preventing this from happening again.
It looks like we really did fund gain of function research in China. Doesn’t mean the epidemic started with a lab leak! But it seems like we should have a conversation about that kind of research being performed in relatively low security labs, or being performed at all.
Are we even capable of having these conversations? I feel like this news should be receiving at least as much attention as the Ivermectin overdose panic. What’s wrong with us?
It’s difficult to think of how you could staff such a commission to really dig in, no matter where the facts lead. I really don’t think we’re up to it, and that’s depressing. I think it would be wonderful to have an effort similar to the 9/11 commission’s.
Well, if we think a well-run commission would be helpful, then I'd rather try and fail than give up preemptively.
I'm all for a commission looking into whatever happened in China, but that's only one of a huge range of topics where a commission could provide helpful insight. Like, what could the CDC have done better? How can we make vaccine production even faster next time? Should the pandemic response team be made into a permanent executive branch office so the staff can't just be fired for no reason? Why did the public health community misunderstand the aerosols issue and how can that kind of thing be prevented next time? What are the best long-run ways to reduce opposition to vaccines in the future? Etc.