Is a black swan the cause of the pandemic crisis?

In Latin, this expression meant an impossibility: all swans were white. However, in the 17th century, a Dutch sailor discovered black swans on the Australian coast.

The theory was launched by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the book Fooled By Randomness which was published in 2001. He cited events such as the development of the internet, the PC, but also the outbreak of World War I and the attacks of September 11, 2001 as examples of black swans.

Tomorrow the sun will rise as it does everyday. But who can assure us, wrote the Englishman Hume, that tomorrow an unknown cosmic phenomenon will not darken our sky?

The goose that we feed does not imagine that one day we will cut its throat instead of being fed. If the Black Swan event is rare, its consequences are sometimes major. Nassim Taleb a disciple of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (the #fractalist man), thinks that the black swan is at the origin of many cataclysms in history and ironically points out that it is only a posteriori, because man needs meaning, that this event will be incorporated into an explanatory, scientific, historical, religious or conspiratorial corpus. It is easier to read the future after than before, and the prophets afterwards are innumerable.

Science that relies on Gaussian ("normal") statistical analysis that separates points of abnormality and focuses on means and standard deviations is not well adapted to extreme events. It is not the only one: both our behavior and policy choices are often based on a future extrapolated in the short term from the past.

A major earthquake will one day affect the San Francisco area, but when? The number of victims will depend on the intensity, epicenter and timing of the earthquake and the technical and organizational measures taken against it, but these measures are costly and useless until the disaster occurs.

Hence the temptation to be optimistic...

Specialists warned of the microbial risk. Bill Gates, in this talk presented a most versatile suspect in the wake of the Ebola epidemic, which had only hit Africa: a virus similar to the flu virus. He was surprised that our societies train so much against nuclear war and so little against the health threat. 

- A lucid observation -

His country is today showing a worrying delay in its reaction to the #coronavirus.

In France, the sale of the reserve protective masks under the pretext of savings will remain as an example of the worst in leadership and governance.

But who hadn't criticized Mrs. Roselyne Bachelot, former French Minister for Health and Sports, between 2007 and 2010, for her useless stocks of flu vaccines?

The best were mistaken in January when they told us that the epidemic would probably have little impact in France. They relied on mathematical models of viral circulation that were certainly impeccable, but which only had values for the parameters that were inserted into them. The members of the government, but also Professor Raoult, were very reassuring at the time. They were dead wrong.

This does not justify the fact that his proposals at the time on #hydroychloroquine were rejected in a sometimes contemptuous manner ("fake news" on the decoders of the French press). I very much hope that he is right and that the product can protect those most at risk... I have a family members in Africa (#Senegal, #CapeVerde and #Angola), I know that #chloroquine, a drug that is very well known and archi used extensively in the past (malaria prevention) is not an "extremely toxic" substance .