Schneier's essay follow-up on a post-9/11 world really crystalized my thinking on what's happening here [1]. I think this quote was particularly poignant:
"We're bad at accurately assessing risk; we tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange, and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar, and common ones. This leads us to believe that violence against police, school shootings, and terrorist attacks are more common and more deadly than they actually are—and that the costs, dangers, and risks of a militarized police, a school system without flexibility, and a surveillance state without privacy are less than they really are."
Or in this case, that COVID is much more fatal, devastating and terrifying than it really is, while the flu is much more tame and approachable -- and that we should spare literally no expense in the world to prevent it. Even though of course the flu kills 650,000 people each and every year, year after year. We're just used to it so we pay it no mind.
What we're seeing is less a pandemic (although of course it is one) and more a bug in human psychology on a massive never-before-seen scale.
I think Schneier is speaking about our memories of events in retrospect, however. Spectacular, strange and rare events are more punctuated in our memories, and therefore take up more of our mind share when reflecting on the past.
What's going on now, in the moment, seems to be something different. I keep hearing people taking minor news stories and blowing them up into apocalyptic scenarios like they WANT them to be true. As an example, there was a story a few days ago about how some tigers at the Bronx Zoo were infected. The next day, I overheard some people talking about how Covid19 is now infecting pets and there are animals spreading it in the streets of NY. Nearly every day I'm hearing things like this. Go look at the trending movies on Netflix - every one of them has to do with pandemics or the world ending. People want to fantasize about these realities. Why is that? It has to be some kind of coping mechanism. Is this an expression of society's deep discontent with the way things are and a desire to see it all come down? Whatever it is, for some reason, imagining the worst case scenario decreases pain/increases pleasure for a lot of people. It's fascinating.
That's a great article, thanks for sharing. I definitely agree that life seems easier in a post-apocalyptic scenario in the same way that re-writing some software from scratch is easier than just fixing it :P i.e. it seems that way now, but definitely isn't when you get there. However, having it as a waypoint marker sure is comforting.
> What we're seeing is less a pandemic (although of course it is one) and more a bug in human psychology on a massive never-before-seen scale.
That's debatable. Great Britain and Netherlands in the beginning wanted to simply let it go and use a "herd immunity" strategy, but changed track quickly after seeing how ICUs were overloaded in Italy and Spain. I've never heard ICUs being overloaded and medical resources being stretched to their limits during the flu season... Could you explain why? Isn't a great difference that we have flu vaccines but no known cure for COVID-19 yet?
> ...but changed track quickly after seeing how ICUs were overloaded in Italy and Spain.
Are you sure it wasn't public push-back?
> I've never heard ICUs being overloaded and medical resources being stretched to their limits during the flu season... Could you explain why?
There's never a whole lot of excess medical capacity since medical capacity is, you know, expensive. The disease burden of the flu is high. The US alone sees 45,000,000 flu infections each year. Having two diseases with the burden of the flu is double high, but it's not a reason to stop the world.
> Isn't a great difference that we have flu vaccines but no known cure for COVID-19 yet?
Yep, sure is. That said, COVID has shown so far to exhibit very little mutation. Globally the delta between viruses is about 15 base pairs. This means a single vaccine (or single infection leading to immunity) may be all we need. [1] The flu mutates regularly and different strains make it out each season which is why the flu vaccine needs to be given each year and why it's different each year. Flu vaccines are much less effective (19-60% [2]) for those reasons than, for instance, an MMR vaccine.
"We're bad at accurately assessing risk; we tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange, and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar, and common ones. This leads us to believe that violence against police, school shootings, and terrorist attacks are more common and more deadly than they actually are—and that the costs, dangers, and risks of a militarized police, a school system without flexibility, and a surveillance state without privacy are less than they really are."
Or in this case, that COVID is much more fatal, devastating and terrifying than it really is, while the flu is much more tame and approachable -- and that we should spare literally no expense in the world to prevent it. Even though of course the flu kills 650,000 people each and every year, year after year. We're just used to it so we pay it no mind.
What we're seeing is less a pandemic (although of course it is one) and more a bug in human psychology on a massive never-before-seen scale.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/08/our_decreas...