Coronavirus: On responding to a rare pandemic danger, and preventing systemic risk

The last 3 days I've been hesitating to post this text, hoping I would see some signs of improvement. Given the current trajectory of things, I invite you to read the post as a minimal civic duty to our families, friends, and the communities we live in.

Perhaps the chief reason why we ought to reconsider the severity of the Coronavirus situation, is not personal risk(though this exists, especially for older people), but rather identifying and preventing a systemic risk. The disproportionately negative impact we could see in the coming weeks, is not only due to the high number of #COVID19 cases we will observe, but counter-intuitively, rather due to the powerful and cumulative second-order effects, which can paralyze a country, once a critical mass of people is contaminated.

I note below some of the most relevant data, based on different studies, added with reference links for verification.

1. The number of #COVID19 cases are constantly increasing around the world. Below is a map with relatively updated data. The reported COVID19 cases are ~102.469, with 3491 deaths, and ~57,444 recovered[1].

2. In the initial phase of Corona outbreak, Nassim Taleb - one of the foremost experts in studying risk[2] - has published a paper[3] in which he outlines a few severe errors which lead to gravely underestimating how the epidemy will evolve:

• Historic examples of pandemic spreading are irrelevant given the unprecedented hyperconnected level of transportation we have achieved. Essentially, the virality of a pathogen, depends on the level of interaction between agents in a physical space. Given the hyper connectedness and high interaction between agents in 2020, extrapolation of previous models for pandemic evolution will manifest a severe bias of underestimating the speed of spreading[4].

• Estimates about virality, as measured by the rate of reproduction R0 - meaning the number of people any infected person will infect, on average, during the infection period - are also underestimated due to a "fat tail"[5] statistical characteristic of a "super spreaders" group, which drastically alters statistical distribution once discovered.

• The mortality rate is also underestimated, due to delays in reporting between the phase of detection, death, and reporting of the death.

3. Confirming the above, there's a recent study showing that the real virality(rate of reproduction R0) of COVID19, is between 4.4 and 6.6[7], meaning 4-5 times more severe than initially reported.

4. By extrapolating the rapid and unexpected spread in Italy[8][9], we can anticipate that the same scenario will be replicated in a majority of countries where detected Corona cases are not treated with proper caution and measures.

5. One of the most important indicators suggesting the spreading speed of an epidemy, is the doubling rate of cases. China showed a doubling rate of 1,8 days before implementing heavy quarantine measures[10], while Korea and Italy seem to double cases every 3 days right now[11][12]. The implications are profound[13]. If you start from 4600 cases(Italy yesterday) and double them every 3 days for only 4 weeks, you reach 2,355,200 cases(!).

It follows that, given the unprecedented connectivity, high virality of COVID19, high rate of interaction between agents, delay with which data can be processed, it is necessary to recognize this as a potential systemic risk and act in a timely manner. Furthermore, there is a precisely calculable point of critical mass, which once contaminated(even with a rate of mortality zero), will overwhelm the medical system of any country to the point of paralysis, setting off a domino effect, with potentially severe social and economic consequences. A quick calculation shows that in Romania, the situation will begin to overwhelm the system once a few thousand people will require medical care in a relatively short time frame, reaching the point of incapacity as the number nears 10.000.

Inescapable conclusions?

1. What differentiates this situation fundamentally from previous ones, is that given hyperconnectivity, any epidemy with high virality unchecked in time, will invariably become a pandemic. Thus, caution dictates that given the proportions of the potential danger, our only open option to minimizing the impact is to behave as though the epidemy is on the verge of becoming a pandemic already.

2. It becomes clear that in lack of an antidote, the most important component we have to control in order to prevent or stop a pandemic, is the rate of interaction between contaminated agents. Thus it becomes necessary to employ a set of drastic and sophisticated measures(see China's example) which go well beyond the reactive and individual ones, like detection based on symptoms, self quarantine, and situation monitoring.

Indeed, necessary general measures will likely have to include:

• Limiting mobility in a relatively early phase of the epidemy and drastically pruning the number of people we come in contact with

• Limiting the rate of interaction between people through collective measures(i.e. temporary closure of kindergartens/schools/universities)

• Changing various social behaviours(i.e. avoiding to go in public spaces with above 10 people gathered)

• Implementing methods of auto monitoring and reporting for the community

Finally, it's important to understand that we can still change things. But failure to reevaluate the severity of the situation, and acting in a timely manner, could end up costing us enormously. Governments should take immediate measures to forming teams for monitoring and preventing pandemic risc, so they can eventually slow down the spreading. Time is of essence in this situation.

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References:
[1] - https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/…/opsdashboa…/index.html…
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
[3] - https://www.academia.edu/…/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_via_No…
[4] - https://medium.com/…/transition-to-extinction-pandemics-in-…
[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_distribution
[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-spreader
[7] - https://www.medrxiv.org/conte…/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/…/2020_coronavirus_outbreak_in_Ita…
[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Templa…/Italy_medical_cases_chart
[10] - https://link.springer.com/arti…/10.1007%2Fs15010-020-01401-y
[11] - https://www.channelnewsasia.com/…/south-korea-covid-19-case…
[12] - http://timesofsweden.com/wp-cont…/…/2020/02/italy-corona.png
[13] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

Kahneman on Expert Intuition

- Excerpt from Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman -

The psychologist Gary Klein tells the story of a team of firefighters that entered a house in which the kitchen was on fire. Soon after they started hosing down the kitchen, the commander heard himself shout, “Let’s get out of here!” without realizing why. The floor collapsed almost immediately after the firefighters escaped. Only after the fact did the commander realize that the fire had been unusually quiet and that his ears had been unusually hot. Together, these impressions prompted what he called a “sixth sense of danger.” He had no idea what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. It turned out that the heart of the fire had not been in the kitchen but in the basement beneath where the men had stood.

We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each
day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common.

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

We are not surprised when a two-year-old looks at a dog and says “doggie!” because we are used to the miracle of children learning to recognize and name things. Simon’s point is that the miracles of expert intuition have the same character. Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. Good intuitive judgments come to mind with the same immediacy as “doggie!”

Superintelligence: Science or Fiction?

Here is an fascinating discussion from the Beneficial AI 2017 conference, featuring some of the brightest minds in the field: Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Demis Hassabis, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Bart Selman, Jaan Tallinn, Sam Harris and Ray Kurzweil.