Mm, most of this seems well-intentioned but a bit confused to me. I might specify the easiest point that's mistaken as this bit:
> So you learn from it, yeah? Next thing comes along with a 10% or 20% chance, you prepare for it. You're in California, so, earthquake: you fill up your garage with supplies. The earthquake never comes. Then there's a 10% or 20% chance of wildfire destroying your community... so you move, except the wildfire never hits that community. Armed robbery. Disease. Storms. All of these have some kind of low probability of happening, but will have super serious consequences if they do, so you -- remembering covid-19 -- prepare for each of them.
In the last decade of living in Berkeley, me and my nearest ~150 friends+acquaintances have not experienced a wildfire destroying our community, an earthquake causing life-threatening damage, armed robbery (a few muggings, but less of us have been affected by 10-100x as are affected by covid), storms causing life-threatening damage, etc. So the probability of all of these cannot be 10% in a given couple-of-months period (as we did to Covid in Feb), because they would all have happened like a dozen times in the last decade if so.
10% is just really, really high, relative to the baseline for life-shattering catastrophes. I've seen journalists say "We can't talk about all the 10% catastrophes, we'd look alarmist!" The level of threat that Covid was in mid February was just not comparable to the tragedies you listed above, it was a straightforward exponential growth in a fairly severe disease happening in many countries. You can argue that at the time I (or professional epidemiologists or whoever) should've assigned it the sort of low probability (<1%) associated with things like armed robbery and wildfire hitting me in Downtown Berkeley, but I think you'd be wrong, there just weren't that level of strong arguments about the baseline safety. It was a real risk, and it was correct to prepare in late Feb (as I did, and self-quarantined as soon as the first Berkeley case was reported in early March).
I just wanted to rebut the thing that seemed most wrong to me. I hope you're well in this difficult time.
> I've seen journalists say "We can't talk about all the 10% catastrophes, we'd look alarmist!"
Alarmism is the bread and butter of journalism. Media consensus was that electing Trump was supposed have led to invading Poland and gassing minorities by now.
> So you learn from it, yeah? Next thing comes along with a 10% or 20% chance, you prepare for it. You're in California, so, earthquake: you fill up your garage with supplies. The earthquake never comes. Then there's a 10% or 20% chance of wildfire destroying your community... so you move, except the wildfire never hits that community. Armed robbery. Disease. Storms. All of these have some kind of low probability of happening, but will have super serious consequences if they do, so you -- remembering covid-19 -- prepare for each of them.
In the last decade of living in Berkeley, me and my nearest ~150 friends+acquaintances have not experienced a wildfire destroying our community, an earthquake causing life-threatening damage, armed robbery (a few muggings, but less of us have been affected by 10-100x as are affected by covid), storms causing life-threatening damage, etc. So the probability of all of these cannot be 10% in a given couple-of-months period (as we did to Covid in Feb), because they would all have happened like a dozen times in the last decade if so.
10% is just really, really high, relative to the baseline for life-shattering catastrophes. I've seen journalists say "We can't talk about all the 10% catastrophes, we'd look alarmist!" The level of threat that Covid was in mid February was just not comparable to the tragedies you listed above, it was a straightforward exponential growth in a fairly severe disease happening in many countries. You can argue that at the time I (or professional epidemiologists or whoever) should've assigned it the sort of low probability (<1%) associated with things like armed robbery and wildfire hitting me in Downtown Berkeley, but I think you'd be wrong, there just weren't that level of strong arguments about the baseline safety. It was a real risk, and it was correct to prepare in late Feb (as I did, and self-quarantined as soon as the first Berkeley case was reported in early March).
I just wanted to rebut the thing that seemed most wrong to me. I hope you're well in this difficult time.