Sizwe Ngwenya: Is COVID-19 A Black Swan or is it the Lockdown? (A Historical Perspective)
Sizwe Ngwenya: Is COVID-19 A Black Swan or is it the Lockdown? (A Historical Perspective)
Probabilities is the science of uncertainties. It is by no ways concerned with resolving issues of ‘the unknown’, rather it provides mathematical tools that can be used to strength our knowledge and improve decision-making. Consequentially, to say that there is a less than 1% chance of winning the lottery, is not to know everything about tomorrow’s lottery outcome. However, probabilities do provide a framework and expectations about what playing tomorrow’s lottery might entail. The phrase ‘black swan’, emanates from the title of the 2007 book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A ‘black swan’ is a metaphorical expression, used to characterise an event(s) with the following 3 salient characteristics: 1.) The phenomenon is rare, unpredictable and categorised as anomalous; it is not accompanied by any other antecedent. 2.) The event causes colossal societal impact, be it positive or negative. 3.) After the event has occurred, all its outcomes are rationalised simplistically as if those eventualities were foreseeable despite their peculiar nature and statistical improbability (hindsight bias).
The central theme of the above book also touches a philosophical branch of “epistemology”, which deals with questions of what is knowledg (its nature), how do we know what we know and how do justify and rationalise our beliefs. A priori knowledge is the kind of knowledge that one knows of independently without any experience. For centuries, people asserted, based solely on limited experience, that it was inconceivable for any other colour swan to exist other than a kind that was white. This strongly-held belief, based purely on knowledge not fully tested to epistemic reality and ignoring probabilities, was shattered and exposed the fragility of the basic foundations of human beliefs when black swans were discovered crusading with their white siblings (as if nothing could be more unusual). Using the analogy of a black swan, these would include political and economic events such as: the stock market crash of 1929; the invention of the internet and some would debate whether the 9/11 attacks would meet the eligibility criteria for a black swan. Some who rigorously studied Milton Friedman and Fredrich Hayek in the '60s and '70s (see Hayek’s 1976 book, ‘The Denationalisation of Money’. would have predicted the invention of cryptocurrency. Nevertheless, bitcoins have also been labelled as black swan events
The arrival of the novel Coronavirus, does appear, on initial application, to possess traits of a black swan: It is an unusual event; the IMF estimates its impact to contract global economic productivity to levels of the Great Depression; and many will in months or years later, try to analyse the events preceding and during this pandemic as if those were predictable and simple to anticipate. However, upon further piercing of the definition of ‘black swan’, history and biology would profusely disagree that COVID-19 is a black swan. At most, it would be best described as a grey swan. Unlike a black swan, a grey swan is also a significant impactful event that is highly unlikely, but the core distinction is that the occurrence of grey swans is still possible albeit its infrequency. The COVID-19 might have arrived unexpectedly, but the class of its nature is not an oddity or outright random: centuries of historical archives provide rich evidence of pandemics – from the Spanish flu of 1918, The Hong Kong flu of 1968, the Medieval Black death of 14 century, other influenza outbreaks, small-pox, malaria, yellow-fever, tuberculosis inter alia.
If we acknowledge that COVID-19 is not a black swan - and is not projected to reach the pinnacle destructive biological proportions of other pandemics, then the fundamental question that needs to be probed is the following: Why then is this pandemic posed to eclipse its other cousins insofar as its pernicious reach and calamity to economies and livihoods? We can attempt to answer this question through time-travel by juxtaposing, the salient similarities and differences in measures and responses to COVID-19, with a similar contagion over a century ago- that also at its peak had no vaccine - The Spanish flu of 1918.
History and politics are two sides of the same coin: On the one side, history represents past politics -on the flip side, current politics represents present history. Each generation inherits history from its predecessors- history and collective memory form an inseparable and inextricable part of our identities. If used correctly, historical archives can serve as a compass (or predictive power), to make sense of the present. To date the Coronavirus has claimed the lives of over 300 000 people - a parallel and almost similar pandemic - the Spanish flu- claimed the lives of region of 50 -100 million (it should also be heed that the global population a century ago was not of a comparable size to today). In terms of striking similarities, both generations responded to the Spanish Flu and Coronavirus by implementing non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs). These NPIs include: travel restrictions, quarantining those infected, closure of schools, restaurants, wearing of masks, and banning of public gatherings. However, what is categorically different between these two dicthomised pandemics, is that even though some businesses did reduce activities during the 1918 pandemic, these were not prolonged and varied country by country. It is only during the COVID-19 crisis that countries, worldwide (almost concurrently), introduced unprecedented sweeping lockdown measures halting all economic and social activities for months – this is the black swan.
What then are the possible underlying narratives contributing to differences in perceptions between then and now? For starters, globalisation is indeed a contributing factor that has widen the reach of pandemics – this might explain the global, deliberate, orchestrated and coordinated lockdown approach of 2020; the world is more connected than a century ago and fuels a perfect recipe for exponential infections. Secondly, at the time when the Spanish flu occurred, countries such as the US were embroiled in World war 1 - the Spanish flu was packaged as a subsection of the war - newspaper headlines at those times were more skewed to patriotic fervor of fighting a known external human foe vis-à-vis an unknown internal virus.
Whatever the other differences are, the conclusion is that COVID-19 is not a black swan: it is rare but is not something that has never been seen before; pandemics are biological existential threats that occur at irregular internals. What does appear to be the black swan is us. Our response to COVID-19, accompanied mainly by months of unsustainable lockdowns, central-planning, the inability to check unbridled fear with new evidence and other questionable policy choices divorced from reality: this is creating another novel parallel socio-economic and health crisis that will be bigger than the Coronavirus contagion. While history has valuable insights about dealing with pandemics, history also underscores a great irony: despite centuries of pandemics - coupled with the proliferation of contemporary medical and scientific advances - the world still does not have a good grasp on how to respond to pandemics and balance trade-offs on contradictory medical, economic and socio evidence. There will be another infectious grey-swan in the coming 100 years – more virulent than COVID-19. What remains to be seen, is whether it will take us another 99 years to learn from this one
Written by Sizwe Ngwenya – View expressed are of the author
Other interesting notes:
o Pandemic influenza: Studying the lessons of history, Stephen S. Morse, 2007,
o The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System, The New Yorker, By Bernard Avishai, April 2020
o Coronavirus and the Great Lockdown: A Non-Biological Black Swan, Paul Roderick Gregory, May 2020