Tag Archives: risk

October 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.

Most hopeful story: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?

gain-of-function research

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According to Vanity Fair, a lab in New York collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans”. I personally don’t care about the “lab leak hypothesis” at this point. It is clear that this type of research is common now and probably happening all over the world. It needs to be tightly monitored and controlled or we may be in for a bleak future.

“Disease X”

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Are you worried that nobody is prepared for the next big pandemic? Have no fear, there is a group preparing to “advise the WHO on developing a framework to define comprehensive studies” about that. And after that, the WHO is going to be “developing policies and enhancing preparedness” about it. I am sure this will not take very long!

It seems like the UN and the WHO should be the organization to lead this effort globally, and creating new bodies in parallel would be redundant and counter-productive. But the UN approach did not seem to work very well this last time around. There are also the intertwined risks of natural pandemics, biological warfare and biological terrorism that need to be dealt with, and the WHO does not seem to be the agency to deal with these as existential threats. It seems to be more about representing the world’s under-represented people and countries at the table where these things are discussed.

In the U.S., our existing agencies (CDC, customs, FEMA, etc.) did not deal with this threat effectively. Again, nobody wants to just make new redundant agencies, and nobody wants to just turn the thing over to the military industrial complex. But it seems like we need to do something. Maybe this is why Obama created the “white house office of pandemic whatever” to try to coordinate or at least understand all this. Not a new parallel agency, but a new layer of oversight or at least a watchdog. The government grows this way, and the new growth may be healthy, but we never prune out the dead underbrush.

asteroids can sneak up on us

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I have been putting asteroid strikes in the category of potentially catastrophic but so rare as to not worry about. I have also assumed we would see a really big one coming for decades if not centuries and would at least have a chance to get organized and do something about it (a big if, given the lack of coordinated international response to climate change and the pandemic.) But according to this Jerusalem Post article, a fairly sizable asteroid could sneak up on us by passing close to the sun on its way to us. This happened on September 16, 2021 with an asteroid somewhere in the 50-100 m diameter range. The article doesn’t do the math on what size conventional or nuclear weapon this would be the equivalent of if it hit. I thought that was pretty standard…

The article has an interesting (and chilling) photo of the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid streaking in, which was about 17 m wide. The article says that on April 13, 2029, a 340 m asteroid is supposed to “safely pass by” the earth at a distance of “under 32,000 km”. Assuming the article has the number right, that is only about one-tenth the distance from the Earth to the moon. This sounds like one to watch.

Covid-19 probably wasn’t made in a lab, but something like it could be at any time

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This Atlantic article is about a grant proposal to artificially create something very close to Covid-19 in a laboratory. Not to worry, it was not funded and it does not prove or disprove the “lab leak hypothesis”. Wait a minute, regardless of the lab leak hypothesis, what is chilling here is that the technology exists to create a Covid-like bioweapon or something even worse in a laboratory right now. This does not particularly surprise me, but it is scary. Even if we assume scientists in leading countries like the U.S. and China are relatively well regulated and have relatively high ethical standards, somewhere in the world there will be experts who are not as ethical and people willing to fund them. And over time, the technology will become more accessible to more people. And garage biotechnology will be harder to monitor and control than nuclear technology.

If I were spinning conspiracy theories here, I would say isn’t it an interesting coincidence that U.S. laboratories are set up to genetically engineer a Covid-19 if they want to, and U.S. laboratories also happened to have the vaccine for Covid-19 pretty much developed and ready to commercialize when needed. Hmm…I have no evidence of this and am not saying it is likely, I am just saying it is a story that would not be inconsistent with reality.

September 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.

Most hopeful story: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.

August 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?

Most hopeful story: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.

U.S. not prepared for megadisasters

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The description for this 2006 book Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do is eerily prophetic. Then again, I can’t rule out the possibility that it was updated in the last year or so to appear eerily prophetic in hindsight.

Five years after 9/11 and one year after Hurricane Katrina, it is painfully clear that the government’s emergency response capacity is plagued by incompetence and a paralyzing bureaucracy. Irwin Redlener, who founded and directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, brings his years of experience with disasters and health care crises, national and international, to an incisive analysis of why our health care system, our infrastructure, and our overall approach to disaster readiness have left the nation vulnerable, virtually unable to respond effectively to catastrophic events…

As a doctor, Redlener is especially concerned about America’s increasingly dysfunctional and expensive health care system, incapable of handling a large-scale public health emergency, such as pandemic flu or widespread bioterrorism. And he also looks at the serious problem of a disengaged, uninformed citizenry—one of the most important obstacles to assuring optimal readiness for any major crisis.

Amazon

I thought we responded okay to 9/11 in terms of the actual local area where it happened. Obviously we didn’t prevent it or prepare for it, and starting two wars with countries that were mostly uninvolved can’t really be considered a response at all. Katrina is another story. When I look back, that failure on a regional scale was a harbinger of our coronavirus failure on a national scale. And coronavirus, awful as it has been, is marginal in terms of what a megadisaster could really unleash – think a disease that kills 99% instead or 1% of people infected, even a limited nuclear war, an earthquake or volcano large enough to devastate an entire densely populated region, sudden ice sheet collapse, or a catastrophic collapse of the food and/or energy systems.

It seems to me that surviving the medium-term future as a nation and civilization requires us to address both the slow and steady long-term trends like global warming, and to be prepared for the sudden catastrophic events we are going to have to deal with. The two are clearly related – dealing with the long term trends can lessen the frequency and severity of some of the short-term events, but not eliminate them.

causes of death during the Covid-19 crisis

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CDC has a data table on excess deaths during the March-August 2020 period. Obviously, people died of Covid-19 itself, but they also died of other things indirectly caused by Covid-19.

  • 257,000 excess deaths compared to long-term average (I’m rounding numbers to the nearest thousand and nearest percent or so, although when I do math I will round after I do the math)
  • 174,000 due to Covid-19 disease itself – this is around 70% of the total, so 30% of the excess deaths were indirect (and/or random bad luck)
  • Drug overdoses were 13% higher than normal, but suicides were 6% lower than normal. These two things usually go together so there is a bit of a mystery here.
  • Homicides were 6% higher than normal. They don’t break down how much is domestic violence related versus street violence. I would imagine bar fights were down significantly.
  • “Unintentional injuries” were higher than normal. I imagine this is things like falls and drowning, but not motor vehicle crashes because those are separate. Maybe people hurt themselves doing things around the house. Unfortunately, we tend to take more risks doing similar activities around the house than if we were doing them at work.
  • Motor vehicle crashes were down slightly, but the drop was not statistically significant. Given the very significant drop in traffic last year, this suggests to me that deaths per mile traveled were high. I know pedestrian and bike deaths were disproportionately high last year. I would attribute a lot this to people driving faster and more recklessly on (perceived to be) empty streets and highways. This is unfortunate, but mostly human nature and needs to be solved by better street design. Solutions exist, we just need to reach out and grab them my fellow Americans!

So I think these data support the idea that street designs and a health care system that are at least average compared to modern developed countries would have saved U.S. lives during the pandemic, and would continue to save lives in the future. So can we have nice things or not?

about 80% protection against Covid-19 reinfection in a Danish study

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When scientists are saying “we are not 100% sure” people who have had Covid-19 will have some immunity to reinfection, many smart people I know are hearing “people who have had Covid-19 have no immunity to infection”. Similarly, when scientists say they are not absolutely sure vaccinated people will not spread the virus (although they are quickly changing their tune on this one as they look at the evidence), people are hearing that vaccinated people are spreading the virus. Here is at least one study showing that when people who had a confirmed infection were tested again three months later, protection against reinfection was pretty good but not perfect at about 80%. It appears to have been lower in people over 65 at about 50%.

The CDC and others have also thrown out 3 months as a minimum amount of time they are confident people are protected against reinfection or protected by a vaccine. I think this is just a conservative estimate in the face of limited information, but again the public is hearing “no protection after 3 months”. In this study, they tested again after 6 months and found no decrease in the level of protection (still about 80%).

So my view is that logic suggests being infected would provide at least some protection against reinfection and being able to spread the virus, and the same for vaccination. I say this because this is how other diseases work. And now the data are backing that up. The science and public health policy communication are still pretty bad, and like a toxic spill, bad communication that takes a few hours can take years to clean up on the surface and there will still be puddles of toxic mess for decades whenever you turn over a rock.