Unsurprisingly, humans are not good at accounting for black swan events, and even less so for averted ones.
Unsurprisingly, humans are not good at accounting for black swan events, and even less so for averted ones.
Even if every other country has Y2K levels of success containing the Coronavirus, we can still point skeptics at the example of places like Italy to prove it was a real threat.
Things that are inevitable only when you encompass time spans longer than a human life (it has been approximately one and a half average human lifespans since the previous pandemic) may be predictable at that large aggregate scale, but on useful scales they are not. Or, to put it another way, if you've been shorting the market since 1918 for the next pandemic crash, you went bankrupt a long time ago.
Y2K is only a black swan for those not in the industry, since that one is obviously intrinsically timing based. The UNIX timestamp equivalent is also equally predictable to you and I, but to the rest of the world will seem even more arbitrary if it's still a problem by then. (At least Y2K was visibly obviously special on the normal human calendar.) But I wouldn't claim the term for that; call it a bit of sloppiness in my writing.