Is coronavirus a black swan event?
Black swan is the name Lebanese scholar Nassim Taleb came up with years ago to describe an event that is rare and unpredictable, catastrophic in impact and in hindsight, a blindingly obvious disaster waiting to happen.
The coronavirus story is still to play out and by the time we finally step back to reflect on the loss of life, economic ruin and social disruption it caused, it may well fit the bill.
But the experts I’ve talked to aren’t picking it as a black swan. Let’s face it, we knew another potentially lethal virus was going to emerge, and that China would be a likely incubator.
Covid-19 has resulted in significant loss of life, altered our day-to-day existence and killed the stockmarket’s bull run.
But we’ve seen and dealt with worse pandemics before and there will be bigger disasters to deal with in future.
Government bureaucrats secretly like the idea of black swan events. It suggests that the world is random and unpredictable and that they are not to blame.
But that’s not true of coronavirus.
We knew that if you don’t act radically to stop a highly contagious virus from spreading, you have to live with the consequences of the exponential growth in infections and the massive strain on the public health system that result.
We knew that the contagion would disrupt industry, sending markets into a nosedive and plunging us into recession.
We knew that widespread and effective testing for infection was crucial to containing the virus and that people would do strange things like panicbuy groceries and hoard toilet paper as the emergency unfolded. It’s all so obvious, in hindsight.
We can’t let ourselves off the hook by assigning this black swan status. We knew it was coming and we under-prepared, under-invested and are now paying the price. We now have to set about applying what we already knew before Covid-19 emerged.
Incidentally, I did see a black swan last week. It was paddling around contentedly in a pond near Arrowtown in Central Otago. It was an Aussie import. They are quite common here.
We knew another potentially lethal virus was going to emerge, and that China would be a likely incubator.