The cool kid move, for now, is dismissing swine flu (or type A H1N1 influenza to be precise) as an overblown hoax.
Taleb’s Black Swan theory “refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.”
The unnerving aspect of swine flu is that if nothing much happens, then we all turn out fine because, well, nothing much happened.
But if the virus mutates in its travels, and comes back in a “second wave” as some far more deadly form, then we could have one hell of a black swan on our hands – with tragic loss implications far bigger and nastier than any event in living memory.
SHOOT: I'll repeat that for those with ADD (that includes you, the Medai) - if the virus mutates in its travels [and btw that's what virusses do], then we could have one hell of a black swan on our hands – far bigger and nastier than any event in living memory.
That's big. That's nasty. And worth paying attention to, or worth paying the price for not paying attention.
The WHO – as in World Health Organization, not Pete Townshend & Co. – has faced a blast of snarky criticism from those who felt that the raising of the alarm to threat level 5, one notch below full-blown pandemic, was an irresponsible act of overkill.
“After all,” the critics scoff, “the plain old brown bag flu kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, and no one has bothered to sound the alarm about that. Surely a mere handful of deaths is little more than an excuse for the media to gin up panic.”
Nor has the credibility of the swine flu threat been helped by ridiculous actions from panicked governments, like Egypt’s 100% useless decree to slaughter every pig in sight – or Iraq’s plan to kill the wild boars in the Baghdad Zoo. (Wait… Baghdad has a zoo?)
It’s clear what global equity markets think of swine flu. (Not worth a Kleenex.) But, nonetheless, WHO was right to sound the alarm. And we are not yet out of the woods.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment