Obligatory Covid-19 blogging

SARS-CoV-2 spike ectodomain structure (open state)
SARS-CoV-2 spike ectodomain structure (open state) https://3dprint.nih.gov/discover/3DPX-013160
Over at Practical Ethics I have blogged a bit:

The Unilateralist Curse and Covid-19, or Why You Should Stay Home: why we are in a unilateralist curse situation in regards to staying home, making it rational to stay home even when it seems irrational.

Taleb and Norman had a short letter Ethics of Precaution: Individual and Systemic Risk making a similar point, noting that recognizing the situation type and taking contagion dynamics into account is a reason to be more cautious. It is different from our version in the effect of individual action: we had single actor causing full consequences, the letter has exponential scale-up. Also, way more actors: everyone rather than just epistemic peers, and incentives that are not aligned since actors do not bear the full costs of their actions. The problem is finding strategies robust to stupid, selfish actors. Institutional channeling of collective rationality and coordination is likely the only way for robustness here.

Never again – will we make Covid-19 a warning shot or a dud? deals with the fact that we are surprisingly good at forgetting harsh lessons (1918, 1962, Y2K, 2006…), giving us a moral duty to try to ensure appropriate collective memory of what needs to be recalled.

This is why Our World In Data, the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker and IMF’s policy responses to Covid-19 are so important. The disjointed international responses act as natural experiments that will tell us important things about best practices and the strengths/weaknesses of various strategies.

Ebola and the dragon

Here is a reason not to worry too much about Ebola… yet. I took the WHO data on Ebola outbreaks and plotted it. The distribution is not power-law distributed (looks bent on a loglog scale) but is decently exponential (straight on a semilog scale). The probability goes down fast with size.

ebolaoutbreaks

However, when we add the final toll from the current outbreak (1603 suspected cases with 887 fatalities at August 1) it might turn out to be a “dragon-king” bucking the line: in that case we should expect that large international outbreaks follow an entirely new dynamic. This is mildly worrying. Still, it is early days.