I am reminded of the significant trans-Atlantic differences in the interpretation of Basel's "living will" directive.
In America the approach, roughly speaking, was "please price up the cost of your funeral, in the event that you die. Then if your capital ever gets too close to this amount, we'll shoot you in the head and use your money to bury you."
In Europe, on the other hand, the approach was effectively "please think up all the possible ways that you might die. Then take measures that would prevent each specific cause of death."
I feel that each approach contained something of value that the other lacked, but nevertheless was unhappy in its own way.
The problem with stress testing is that central banks are run by economists, backstopped by lawyers. Mere supervisors are Morlocks, not fit to associate with the quants and verbalists. After a while, this becomes self-fullfilling. The best way to become a senior supervisor is to start as a central bank economist. The second-best way is to start as a central bank lawyer. This ensures a policy caste with very clean fingernails--never a good idea.
The UK *was* incredibly well-prepared, but plans are only useful if you make some attempt to use them and I don't think the flu/corona distinction was key. Local government had always been the main agency for public health, contact tracing and the like. See, for example the local government involvement in the Salisbury novichok incident. People who worked on such matters there (though weakened by long years of hollowing out) were waiting and prepared to be called upon. But they weren't because of Cummings-Johnson-Tory hostility to local government and ideological beliefs that things were better done by a combo of central government and private contractors.
Yes! The plans as written on bits of paper were good but that is not the same as having the capacity to deliver them. It's like interviewing for jobs that require technical expertise: you absolutely have to actually test the expertise (Fizzbuzz is the famous example for coders) because being able to give a compelling account of what you would do is a separate capability from being able to do it.
My question would be what criteria are used to rate countries "best prepared for a pandemic?" But the USA and UK were short of protective gear for hospital staff and civilians. The UK government botched the acquisition of needed gear. The USA had at the start of the epidemic, a president unwilling to even acknowledge it might be a problem and delayed doing anything. Worse politics interfered with the response. Republican voters today refuse to respond to sensible public health safety advice and even try to prevent others from doing so.
I watched the new, US "War Game" documentary. It was clear that there was trepidation even when making needed decisions because of fears of making an error and getting backlash.
As for battles and "generals fighting the last war", this is exactly the mistake Russia made when it invaded Ukraine. There was a claim (I don't know how true it was) that a red team was able to sink or disable a US aircraft carrier simply by swarming it with small boats and explosives that overwhelmed its formidable defenses. Whilst carriers are impressive platforms for force projection, we still haven't entirely learned the lessons of naval warfare since WWI.
Human actions are not predictable. History provides examples and a narrative but is poor at prediction. No amount of math and creating rules can solve this. Simulations via scenarios are better as they involve people and the decisions they make in response to complex factors, their personalities, etc.
The reference is to Exercise Millennium Challenge, which ended with both sides in the exercise claiming that the exercise umpires were cheating*, and perhaps more importantly, criticism that the umpires weren't so much trying to help either side as make it turn out so that Donald Rumsfeld was right thematically.
Which seems relevant.
*Red was furious that Blue was allowed to try again, although this was done because there were aspects of the exercise scenario that still needed to be tested and wouldn't be if Red could just declare victory. Blue was furious that Red was allowed to use capabilities it didn't actually have according to the scripted order of battle, or rather to assume that it could do things and then come up with how after the fact.
The only thing I would want to caveat is that I’ve got a persistent hunch that the UK actually performed much better at COVID mitigation than was made out to be, and has instead been penalised in the rankings by being much more meticulous at recording deaths. The canary in the coal mine for me here is that currently the country with the highest COVID death rate is Peru, a country with both somewhat low state capacity and an excellent national statistics agency - given the UK was another one of the countries on the highest quality agencies, I feel there may be more to the UK’s performance. For similar reasons I also think the UK’s relative productivity problems are massively overstated for similar reasons of both having better recording of hours and it being more difficult to measure services - once again, it’s telling that the highest performing country at productivity is Germany, which has the lowest hours recorded and a ban on overtime which is almost certainly flouted but which incentivises non-reporting.
Given the conclusions of this are however to focus not just simply on the UK’s failings, but also compare them to other countries to see where the UK may have screwed up less than we thought it did, I can’t tell whether this proves or disproves your point!
«I also think the UK’s relative productivity problems are massively overstated for similar reasons of both having better recording of hours and it being more difficult to measure services»
My usual reminder that the UK "productivity questions" was answered years ago very clearly by an ONS person as reported here::
“That big red bubble is North Sea Oil. The UK's massive productivity growth from 1990-2006 was due to oil, not financial services. Even energy utilities downstream from North Sea Oil had a greater productivity rise than financial services. And both oil and utilities suffered a massive collapse. The collapse of North Sea Oil productivity started in 2004. And as this chart shows, that is when the price of Brent crude started to rise - astronomically”
In 2007 (around the same month Tony Blair passed the task to catch the falling knife to Gordon Brown) the UK became a net importer of oil:
The 1960s and 1970s are back and a lot of "fiscal space" has evaporated. As to the benefits of being an oil exporter the young Tony Blair wrote very lucidly in 1987:
“Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed two advantages over any other post-war premier. First, her arrival in Downing Street coincided with North Sea oil. The importance of this windfall to the Government’s political survival is incalculable. [...]
Bank lending has been growing at an annual rate of around 20 per cent (excluding borrowing to fund house purchases); credit-card debt has been increasing at a phenomenal rate; and these have combined to bring a retail-sales boom – which shows up dramatically in an increase in imported consumer goods.
Previously such a boom and growth in imports would have produced a balance-of-payments deficit, a plunging currency and an immediate reining-back on spending, with lower rates of growth.
Instead, oil has earned foreign exchange and also produces remittance payments from overseas investments bought with oil money. The situation is neither stable nor healthy in the long term: but in the short term it allows the living standards of the majority to rise rapidly, even though the industrial base, the ultimate foundation of a successful economy, is still only achieving the levels of output of 1979.
The fact that we have failed to use oil to build a productive and modern industry for the future is something historians will deplore.”
And here we are as predicted. But nobody seems that willing to acknowledge that the 1982-2007 period was exceptional.
«the UK "productivity questions" was answered years ago very clearly [...] “That big red bubble is North Sea Oil. The UK's massive productivity growth from 1990-2006 was due to oil, not financial services.”»
“Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979, takes credit for the eventual British turnaround. And she is responsible for many positive changes. But the fact is that 1979 was also the year that North Sea oil started flowing. You find me an elephant oil field and I will show you a very good time, too.”
BTW there was no turnaround: Thatcher and Blair achieved a halving of the rate of the growth of UK per-person GDP, despite or perhaps thanks (it would have been worse without it) that elephant oil field.
You don't have to get better when you get lucky. Decision makers will be gone when the future arrives. Cool!
Funny how our "accounting" systems don't account for consequences, they can't count what counts, and don't hold "responsible" parties responsible. How do you account for that? Should we plead the Fifth, or insanity? We are living in Alice in Wonderland's world here.
The real world is over there ------->
Maybe we can lend-lease you some American Doge-o-crats to help you figure it all out. They are already warming up their chain saws. They are the smartest kids in the room.
Unfortunately, the room is study hall.
Didn't you always want to watch the French Revolution in person?
The best measure I've seen of states' relative performance was one which ignored figures for covid deaths (which were very susceptible to local variation in counting practice) and just counted excess deaths full stop. It showed the UK was a fairly mid-table European performer. A bit better than most of southern Europe, not quite as good as most of Northern Europe, much better than most of Eastern Europe. Which to me suggests that how countries performed probably had a lot more to do with overall state capacity than what mistakes were or weren't made at the outset...
«the UK was a fairly mid-table European performer. A bit better than most of southern Europe, not quite as good as most of Northern Europe, much better than most of Eastern Europe. Which to me suggests that how countries performed probably had a lot more to do with overall state capacity than what mistakes were or weren't made at the outset...»
If the purpose of an argument is to show that "Washington Consensus" european countries using the same anti-collectivist policies (or worse) achieved much the same death rates and damage to their economies, astutely restricting the comparison to them is the way to do it.
If the purpose is to check whether "mistakes were or weren't made at the outset" then comparing numbers with "test-trace-isolate" "zero COVID" countries like hard-right Australia or Singapore with several times lower death rates and growing instead of shrinking economies is better..
BTW one of the more sordid and revolting aspects of the COVID-19 era was that at some point as the enormous difference in outcomes between "Washington Consensus" and "zero COVID" countries became apparent much of the press in the "Washington Consensus" countries run a malevolent and obviously concerted propaganda campaign of smears against "zero COVID" policies and against the countries whose government had adopted it.
I think you're on to something and look forward to the new book.
It's worth distinguishing between situations where you've over-focused on learning the lesson from last time and next time turns out different, and situations where you've appropriately learned the lesson from last time and so next time has to turn out different.
The Maginot line manifestly failed to prevent the fall of France in 1940 but it did succeed in preventing a conventional attack directly from Germany in to France, forcing the Germans to invent a new form of mobile warfare, and even with that they still had to go around via Belgium.
The aviation industry has an admirable track record of focusing very hard on learning the lesson from last time (by comparison with other industries - there is room for improvement). For particular sorts of lessons - the continuing use of lead in avgas is one where the lesson is glaringly obvious but the industry has singularly failed to learn it.
Target fixation still kills for real! A high school classmate of mine died this exact way. One day while doing gunnery practice in his A-10 "Warthog" attack jet he got fixated and flew the jet into the ground.
Target fixation was a known problem for these pilots. We all talked about this at the funeral. His father told me that his son had said that if anything ever happened to him, they would send two uniformed people to the house to inform him. It happened.
The aviation community has overcome so many of the common problems that used to kill people that it is now more concerned with new problems, such as the air traffic system being overstressed, or Boeing losing the ability to build safe airplanes planes.
Pilots have a strong learning culture. When they screw up, they can die.
But external actors are not like that. The bu$ine$$men and politicians who would "improve" this system can afford to be reckless with other people's lives. They can sow chaos everywhere they go.
Maybe they would have us adopt something like the anything-goes banking culture that brought the Icelandic economy to its knees. Why not: their kind of people were the winners in that system! The little people faced the consequences.
MONEY is one of the biggest "target fixations" there is! Do I see an elephant in the room?
This could become a very long discussion.
Power (who has it) is a factor to consider. Maybe someone could map out where the power is.
I don't believe that it is actually that difficult to devise a plan that adequately covers just about all possible epidemic scenarios. If we don't have one, I stongly suspect it's because actually impressive people with the wherewithal and integrity to come up with such a plan are kept out of positions of influence by a system that prefers manipulative egomaniacs. The impressive people become civil servants or other technicians, while the egomaniacs neither understand nor really care about any such plan and therefore are unlikely to direct sufficient resources to one. The resources I have in mind include, maybe primarily, objectively low-value but indispensable ones like their own time, attention, status, media profile, etc.
That, if there is an issue, is probably what needs to be fixed. It is at least a systems problem that could probably in theory be solved.
«If we don't have one, I stongly suspect it's because actually impressive people with the wherewithal and integrity to come up with such a plan are kept out of positions of influence by a system that prefers manipulative egomaniacs [...] the egomaniacs neither understand nor really care about any such plan.»
“An old mining MP called Bill Stone, who used to sit in the corner of the Strangers' Bar drinking pints of Federation ale to dull the pain of his pneumoconiosis. He was eavesdropping on a conversation at the bar, where someone said exasperatedly about the Commons: "The trouble with this place is, it's full of c*nts!"
Bill put down his pint, wiped the foam from his lip and said: "They's plenty of c*nts in the country, and they deserve some representation." (To get the full effect, say it aloud in a broad northern accent.)
As a description of parliamentary democracy, that strikes me as unbeatable.”
Am reminded of Michael Lewis' books "The Fifth Risk" and "The Premonition." The real heroes are "nobodies."
Sucks-up suck their way up to the top. They come from the Dunning-Kruger hiring hall.
The real people have actual work to do, so naturally they get laid off in the name of economy, or for no reason at all. Shoulda played the game of politics better!
But Lewis quotes the football coach Bill Parcells: "You are what your record says you are."
I would add: when the Game of Life is over, you are stuck with your record. You cannot talk your way out of it.
Coincidence or not? Yesterday I drove past a small airport where 3 years ago a private jet took off from a short runway, 3,600 feet. Just legal if nothing weird happened. Well, the parking brake never fully released...they never got flying speed, went off the runway into a building, all 4 aboard died, 2 injured in the building.
The building they crashed into belongs to "Trumpf Inc," German-based company whose products include "fabricating machinery."
Seems to be pretty much what you're talking about: a test to see how a pilot fails, with no chance of success (unless you are Captain Kirk, I supoose), and very much not about finding a solution to the specific scenario.
«according to the Global Health Security Index, as of the start of 2020, the United Kingdom was the second-best prepared country in the world in terms of overall preparedness for a novel pathogen [...] target fixation is a huge risk in the otherwise useful and important exercise of scenario planning [...] some systems, including that of the UK, were incredibly well-drilled for a pathogen that behaved basically like flu.»
I read this blog because I like systems thinking and discussion of cognitive biases but sometimes I am simple minded and I think that politics and interests are more determinant in some cases. So first I will present the most important data about the COVID-19 pandemic, estimated death rated per million for some selected (in particular because of not too different age profiles) groups of countries:
#1 Peru 6,504; Bulgaria 5,663; Hungary 4,896
#2 UK 3,396; USA 3,331; Italy 3,243; Poland 3,001
#3 Russia 2,764; Bermuda 2,569, Sweden 2,347; Germany 2,098
#4 Finland 1,841; Iran 1,652; Israel 1,340; Norway 1,036
#5 Australia 901; New Zealand 642; Thailand 480; Vietnam 440; Singapore 332; China 85
What is most important is the enormous difference between group #5 and the other, in particular groups #2 and #3. This enormous difference is very obviously because the governments of the countries in group #5 adopted various forms of "test-trace-isolate" to contain contagion, while the government of countries in groups #2 and #3 adopted various half-baked forms of general lock-down.
As to the UK at the start of COVID-19 the well-prepared approach was "test-trace-isolate" as clearly recommended by the Chief Science Officer and the Chief Medical Officer (Vallance and Whitty) and the Johnson government started to award contracts to implement that approach. But that approach was cancelled and replaced with ahfl-baked general lock-downs with the full and committed support of Starmer's party.
Why did that happen? Because of cognitive biases like "target fixation"? Because of cybernetic system flaws?
I do not think think so; in my simplistic view I agree with an author who said it was because of ideology that is the deliberate rejection of the "collectivist" nature of public health measures and their incompatibility with "fatalistic liberalism" (largely overlapping with "thatcherism" or "methodological individualism"):
“In a report released last December, the cross-party joint committee on national security strategy condemned the government for having “failed seriously to consider how it might scale up testing, isolation and contact-tracing capabilities during a serious disease outbreak” [...] this governing approach, which we call “fatalistic liberalism”, allows it to place the blame on the mix of public behaviour and natural causes. Risk appears to be the consequence of personal choice – people can decide whether to wear a mask or whether to get vaccinated – not the result of policy decisions made at the top”
Curiously the fairly right-wing anti-socialist governments of Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Singapore, China-Taiwan did use "test-trace-isolate" because it was well known to be the most effective.
«in my simplistic view I agree with an author who said it was because of ideology that is the deliberate rejection of the "collectivist" nature of public health measures and their incompatibility with "fatalistic liberalism" (largely overlapping with "thatcherism" or "methodological individualism")»
Here is a mention of an early sterling thatcherite/"methodologically individualist" argument during a long and hard campaign against "collectivist" public health programmes and here against building sewers for London:
“State action to improve public health was in its infancy in the 1800s and, although it had its champions, some affluent people in Victorian and Edwardian society were worried that Britain’s individualism and right to an autonomous life was being eroded through these collective means (Hatchet et al., 2012). [...] Objectors did not like this ‘highhanded’ and paternalistic approach and their view was reflected in an editorial in The Times [1854]:
‘We prefer to take our chances with cholera and the rest than be bullied into
health. There is nothing a man hates so much as being cleansed against his will [or having his floors swept, his walls whitewashed, his pet dung heaps cleared away, or his thatch forced to give way to slate] ... all at the command of a sort of sanitary bombaliff. [It is a positive fact that many have died of a good washing]’. (British Library, NDa)
Indeed, one such person was the Prime Minister, Disraeli (Warren, 2000). Disraeli’s libertarian view, and the view of many others at the time, was that poverty (which led to poor health), was due to both ignorance and a failure of character [...]
British Library (no date) Opponents to sanitary reform. Available at:
“Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE. The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said lockdowns are not ideal. Chen also said that the type of mass-testing schemes undertaken in mainland China, where millions of people are screened when a handful of cases are detected, are also unnecessary. "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.”
"What did this island of 23 million people do right? It has had 553 confirmed cases, with only seven deaths. Experts say closing borders early and tightly regulating travel have gone a long way toward fighting the virus. Other factors include rigorous contact tracing, technology-enforced quarantine and widespread mask wearing. [...] Also, as it’s not easy to make people stay in quarantine, Taiwan has taken steps to provide meal and grocery delivery and even some friendly contact via Line Bot, a robot that texts and chats. There is also punishment -- those who break quarantine face fines of up to NT$1million ($35,000). [...] Taiwan has world-class contact tracing -- on average, linking 20 to 30 contacts to each confirmed case. In extreme situations, such as that of a worker at a Taipei City hostess club who contracted the virus, the government tracked down as many as 150 contacts. Then, all contacts must undergo a 14-day home quarantine, even if they test negative.”
But that is... COLLECTIVISM! :-) And as we all know it never worked and never will:
IB Times 2021/01/09 ("Taiwan Reports 3% GDP Growth In Pandemic-hit 2020, Beating China")
“Taiwan Reports 3% GDP Growth In Pandemic-hit 2020, Beating China</i>”
Taiwan News 2021/02/09 ("<i>Taiwan's exports grow for 7th straight month in January")
“Exports jumped 36.8 percent from a year earlier to US$34.27 billion in January, the highest monthly figure on record, according to data compiled by the ministry. The MOF attributed the growth to surging exports in the rising field of remote work applications, as well as traditional exports and a low comparison base compared with January 2020, when the Lunar New Year holiday cut short the number of business days, the data indicated. On a month-to-month basis, Taiwan's outbound sales also rose 3.9 percent in January, the data indicated.”
“The flailing in Washington and state capitals looks even worse when juxtaposed with the success of China, which clamped down on Covid with compulsory mask wearking isolation of the sick, and effective contact tracing. Chinese are blithely eating in restaurants, sitting in theaters, attending school, and going back to work. On Jan. 18 the government reported GDP grew 2.3% in 2020, which makes China the only major economy to to avoid a contraction for the year. Exports helped: they rose 18% in December from a year earlier despite slow demand growth abroad because Chinese exporters grabbed market share from foreign rivals."
“The Chinese city of Qingdao is testing its entire population of nine million people for Covid-19 over a period of five days. The mass testing comes after the discovery of a dozen cases linked to a hospital treating coronavirus patients arriving from abroad. In May, China tested the entire city of Wuhan - home to 11 million people and the epicentre of the global pandemic. The country has largely brought the virus under control. That is in stark contrast to other parts of the world, where there are still high case numbers and lockdown restrictions of varying severity. In a statement posted to Chinese social media site Weibo, Qingdao's Municipal Health Commission said six new cases and six asymptomatic cases had been discovered.”
«As to the UK at the start of COVID-19 the well-prepared approach was "test-trace-isolate" as clearly recommended by the Chief Science Officer and the Chief Medical Officer (Vallance and Whitty)»
“Sir Patrick Vallance says testing needs to be done at scale to find outbreaks and isolate people [...] Sir Patrick Vallance’s comments echo those of Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, who said a week ago that Germany “got ahead” in testing people for Covid-19 and that the UK needed to learn from that. So far, the government has prioritised tests for seriously ill patients in hospital and frontline NHS staff. But Vallance said testing needed to be done at sufficient scale “to look at outbreaks and isolate”, as has happened in countries such as Germany and South Korea. “I think at the beginning Public Health England [PHE] got off to a good start in terms of testing to try and make sure they caught people coming into the country with it,” he told ITV’s weekly Coronavirus Q&A show. “I then think it’s not scaled as fast as it needs to scale – and that’s being done now. But I do think testing is an incredibly important bit of this. It needs to be done at scale, and it needs to be able to be done rapidly enough to look at outbreaks and isolate.” [...] When asked why Germany – which in the week ending 4 April was carrying out an average of 116,655 swab tests a day – had been able to test so many people and keep deaths relatively low, Vallance said testing was “an incredibly important part of how we need to manage this going forward”. However, he added, there were “all sorts of reasons” why Germany had had only 3,194 deaths at that time, compared with 11,329 in UK hospitals, cautioning that its high volume of testing should not be automatically linked with the low death toll.”
“We are now almost four months into this pandemic, and the lessons that can be drawn from east Asian countries on how best to control this coronavirus and keep daily new cases as low as possible are clear. [...]
The first is to aggressively identify where the virus is and break chains of transmission. This requires a “test, trace, isolate” policy that involves mass community testing, tracing those who had been in contact in the previous week with any individual testing positive, and putting all of those individuals into a mandatory quarantine. Governments and local municipalities would have to recruit and train foot soldiers to carry this out. While testing itself is not a solution, it is a crucial part of a package of public health interventions needed to keep identifying clusters of infection and breaking these apart.
The third is to keep constant surveillance of the virus using tracking systems to detect whether certain parts of the country are becoming hotspots and whether sub-populations, such as migrants living in close quarters, have a higher incidence of the virus. [...]
The seventh lesson is that lockdowns, if introduced early and quickly, can slow the spread of the virus, but are not a solution by themselves. They are a costly and crude policy instrument that should be used as sparingly as possible. They allow governments to buy time and use this time to massively increase important public health infrastructure.”
The whole real stress test, and stress testing reminds me of one of my favorite ideas recently, coming out of software architecture - Residuality theory. It is an amazing way to deal with actual real stress tests in a way that is backed by complexity science.
Interesting that it sounds like the UK and USA and likely other countries did the AI equivalent of over fitting towards very specific pandemics in their planning.
But I also don't think that many countries were really ready for a global pandemic. I think most were aiming for an Ebola outbreak like scenario on the deadly side but one which was somewhat easier to contain. A truly prepared country would have had a lot more PPE in reserve.
But protective equipment doesn't last forever. Medicines, even face masks have to be replaced eventually.
Even multivitamins degrade way faster than you expect (only lasting a year or two).
I suspect Asian countries had both more authoritarian control but also more actual experience with previous incidents like H1N1 and other outbreaks.
Hence containing the situation somewhat better. They were better at the hammer and the dance that came with COVID.
I should TLDR my response.
The medical staff in UK and USA might have been ready, but the population weren't.
There's also issues with it becoming political and it coincided with the social media based schizm of people down political lines, whilst racism and other issues were still at the forefront.
I'm USA especially, it didn't help that what the politicians said contradicted what the scientists said and that new science also contradicted previous recommendations. Which in hindsight were probably based on previously run scenarios that fit close enough but turned out they weren't quite right.
On top of that it was a mutating and changing virus.
But I will say that the people at the coal face, those researching COVID and those medical professionals finding themselves having to deal with it all. They did really well with it all. A fast analysis and vaccine. Fast use of face masks and people came to the table with face shields and the countries which quickly implemented harsh shutdowns ended up doing pretty well from what I could tell.
I think for me the most disturbing thing about the saga is that not only did coronavirus spread largely through the air, in the process of experimenting with what that means we learned that flu spreads through the air more than had been thought... and... we've done very little with that knowledge. As such, while I appreciate the idea that we shouldn't get fixated, I'd still feel a little more comfortable if we looked more able to learn lessons from 2020-21.
I'll note in passing as well that the GHSI didn't reckon with the undermining of systems via Osbornomics - a statement which applies distressingly well to large parts of the British state (local government anyone?)
I am reminded of the significant trans-Atlantic differences in the interpretation of Basel's "living will" directive.
In America the approach, roughly speaking, was "please price up the cost of your funeral, in the event that you die. Then if your capital ever gets too close to this amount, we'll shoot you in the head and use your money to bury you."
In Europe, on the other hand, the approach was effectively "please think up all the possible ways that you might die. Then take measures that would prevent each specific cause of death."
I feel that each approach contained something of value that the other lacked, but nevertheless was unhappy in its own way.
Good stuff, I’m reminded of Knightian uncertainty. A recent paper had some interesting perspectives of this in AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13075
We are always searching for our keys under the streetlight.
The problem with stress testing is that central banks are run by economists, backstopped by lawyers. Mere supervisors are Morlocks, not fit to associate with the quants and verbalists. After a while, this becomes self-fullfilling. The best way to become a senior supervisor is to start as a central bank economist. The second-best way is to start as a central bank lawyer. This ensures a policy caste with very clean fingernails--never a good idea.
The UK *was* incredibly well-prepared, but plans are only useful if you make some attempt to use them and I don't think the flu/corona distinction was key. Local government had always been the main agency for public health, contact tracing and the like. See, for example the local government involvement in the Salisbury novichok incident. People who worked on such matters there (though weakened by long years of hollowing out) were waiting and prepared to be called upon. But they weren't because of Cummings-Johnson-Tory hostility to local government and ideological beliefs that things were better done by a combo of central government and private contractors.
Yes! The plans as written on bits of paper were good but that is not the same as having the capacity to deliver them. It's like interviewing for jobs that require technical expertise: you absolutely have to actually test the expertise (Fizzbuzz is the famous example for coders) because being able to give a compelling account of what you would do is a separate capability from being able to do it.
My question would be what criteria are used to rate countries "best prepared for a pandemic?" But the USA and UK were short of protective gear for hospital staff and civilians. The UK government botched the acquisition of needed gear. The USA had at the start of the epidemic, a president unwilling to even acknowledge it might be a problem and delayed doing anything. Worse politics interfered with the response. Republican voters today refuse to respond to sensible public health safety advice and even try to prevent others from doing so.
I watched the new, US "War Game" documentary. It was clear that there was trepidation even when making needed decisions because of fears of making an error and getting backlash.
As for battles and "generals fighting the last war", this is exactly the mistake Russia made when it invaded Ukraine. There was a claim (I don't know how true it was) that a red team was able to sink or disable a US aircraft carrier simply by swarming it with small boats and explosives that overwhelmed its formidable defenses. Whilst carriers are impressive platforms for force projection, we still haven't entirely learned the lessons of naval warfare since WWI.
Human actions are not predictable. History provides examples and a narrative but is poor at prediction. No amount of math and creating rules can solve this. Simulations via scenarios are better as they involve people and the decisions they make in response to complex factors, their personalities, etc.
The reference is to Exercise Millennium Challenge, which ended with both sides in the exercise claiming that the exercise umpires were cheating*, and perhaps more importantly, criticism that the umpires weren't so much trying to help either side as make it turn out so that Donald Rumsfeld was right thematically.
Which seems relevant.
*Red was furious that Blue was allowed to try again, although this was done because there were aspects of the exercise scenario that still needed to be tested and wouldn't be if Red could just declare victory. Blue was furious that Red was allowed to use capabilities it didn't actually have according to the scripted order of battle, or rather to assume that it could do things and then come up with how after the fact.
The only thing I would want to caveat is that I’ve got a persistent hunch that the UK actually performed much better at COVID mitigation than was made out to be, and has instead been penalised in the rankings by being much more meticulous at recording deaths. The canary in the coal mine for me here is that currently the country with the highest COVID death rate is Peru, a country with both somewhat low state capacity and an excellent national statistics agency - given the UK was another one of the countries on the highest quality agencies, I feel there may be more to the UK’s performance. For similar reasons I also think the UK’s relative productivity problems are massively overstated for similar reasons of both having better recording of hours and it being more difficult to measure services - once again, it’s telling that the highest performing country at productivity is Germany, which has the lowest hours recorded and a ban on overtime which is almost certainly flouted but which incentivises non-reporting.
Given the conclusions of this are however to focus not just simply on the UK’s failings, but also compare them to other countries to see where the UK may have screwed up less than we thought it did, I can’t tell whether this proves or disproves your point!
«I also think the UK’s relative productivity problems are massively overstated for similar reasons of both having better recording of hours and it being more difficult to measure services»
My usual reminder that the UK "productivity questions" was answered years ago very clearly by an ONS person as reported here::
http://www.coppolacomment.com/2016/07/the-untold-story-of-uks-productivity.html
https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/dataukprodbysector1970to2013.png
“That big red bubble is North Sea Oil. The UK's massive productivity growth from 1990-2006 was due to oil, not financial services. Even energy utilities downstream from North Sea Oil had a greater productivity rise than financial services. And both oil and utilities suffered a massive collapse. The collapse of North Sea Oil productivity started in 2004. And as this chart shows, that is when the price of Brent crude started to rise - astronomically”
In 2007 (around the same month Tony Blair passed the task to catch the falling knife to Gordon Brown) the UK became a net importer of oil:
https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/dataukoilextrconsexpmazama1965to2015.png
The 1960s and 1970s are back and a lot of "fiscal space" has evaporated. As to the benefits of being an oil exporter the young Tony Blair wrote very lucidly in 1987:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n19/tony-blair/diary
“Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed two advantages over any other post-war premier. First, her arrival in Downing Street coincided with North Sea oil. The importance of this windfall to the Government’s political survival is incalculable. [...]
Bank lending has been growing at an annual rate of around 20 per cent (excluding borrowing to fund house purchases); credit-card debt has been increasing at a phenomenal rate; and these have combined to bring a retail-sales boom – which shows up dramatically in an increase in imported consumer goods.
Previously such a boom and growth in imports would have produced a balance-of-payments deficit, a plunging currency and an immediate reining-back on spending, with lower rates of growth.
Instead, oil has earned foreign exchange and also produces remittance payments from overseas investments bought with oil money. The situation is neither stable nor healthy in the long term: but in the short term it allows the living standards of the majority to rise rapidly, even though the industrial base, the ultimate foundation of a successful economy, is still only achieving the levels of output of 1979.
The fact that we have failed to use oil to build a productive and modern industry for the future is something historians will deplore.”
And here we are as predicted. But nobody seems that willing to acknowledge that the 1982-2007 period was exceptional.
«the UK "productivity questions" was answered years ago very clearly [...] “That big red bubble is North Sea Oil. The UK's massive productivity growth from 1990-2006 was due to oil, not financial services.”»
https://www.jimrogers.com/book/street-smarts-adventures-on-the-road-and-in-the-markets/
“Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979, takes credit for the eventual British turnaround. And she is responsible for many positive changes. But the fact is that 1979 was also the year that North Sea oil started flowing. You find me an elephant oil field and I will show you a very good time, too.”
BTW there was no turnaround: Thatcher and Blair achieved a halving of the rate of the growth of UK per-person GDP, despite or perhaps thanks (it would have been worse without it) that elephant oil field.
Thank you from across the Pond.
You don't have to get better when you get lucky. Decision makers will be gone when the future arrives. Cool!
Funny how our "accounting" systems don't account for consequences, they can't count what counts, and don't hold "responsible" parties responsible. How do you account for that? Should we plead the Fifth, or insanity? We are living in Alice in Wonderland's world here.
The real world is over there ------->
Maybe we can lend-lease you some American Doge-o-crats to help you figure it all out. They are already warming up their chain saws. They are the smartest kids in the room.
Unfortunately, the room is study hall.
Didn't you always want to watch the French Revolution in person?
The best measure I've seen of states' relative performance was one which ignored figures for covid deaths (which were very susceptible to local variation in counting practice) and just counted excess deaths full stop. It showed the UK was a fairly mid-table European performer. A bit better than most of southern Europe, not quite as good as most of Northern Europe, much better than most of Eastern Europe. Which to me suggests that how countries performed probably had a lot more to do with overall state capacity than what mistakes were or weren't made at the outset...
«the UK was a fairly mid-table European performer. A bit better than most of southern Europe, not quite as good as most of Northern Europe, much better than most of Eastern Europe. Which to me suggests that how countries performed probably had a lot more to do with overall state capacity than what mistakes were or weren't made at the outset...»
If the purpose of an argument is to show that "Washington Consensus" european countries using the same anti-collectivist policies (or worse) achieved much the same death rates and damage to their economies, astutely restricting the comparison to them is the way to do it.
If the purpose is to check whether "mistakes were or weren't made at the outset" then comparing numbers with "test-trace-isolate" "zero COVID" countries like hard-right Australia or Singapore with several times lower death rates and growing instead of shrinking economies is better..
BTW one of the more sordid and revolting aspects of the COVID-19 era was that at some point as the enormous difference in outcomes between "Washington Consensus" and "zero COVID" countries became apparent much of the press in the "Washington Consensus" countries run a malevolent and obviously concerted propaganda campaign of smears against "zero COVID" policies and against the countries whose government had adopted it.
I think you're on to something and look forward to the new book.
It's worth distinguishing between situations where you've over-focused on learning the lesson from last time and next time turns out different, and situations where you've appropriately learned the lesson from last time and so next time has to turn out different.
The Maginot line manifestly failed to prevent the fall of France in 1940 but it did succeed in preventing a conventional attack directly from Germany in to France, forcing the Germans to invent a new form of mobile warfare, and even with that they still had to go around via Belgium.
The aviation industry has an admirable track record of focusing very hard on learning the lesson from last time (by comparison with other industries - there is room for improvement). For particular sorts of lessons - the continuing use of lead in avgas is one where the lesson is glaringly obvious but the industry has singularly failed to learn it.
Target fixation still kills for real! A high school classmate of mine died this exact way. One day while doing gunnery practice in his A-10 "Warthog" attack jet he got fixated and flew the jet into the ground.
Target fixation was a known problem for these pilots. We all talked about this at the funeral. His father told me that his son had said that if anything ever happened to him, they would send two uniformed people to the house to inform him. It happened.
The aviation community has overcome so many of the common problems that used to kill people that it is now more concerned with new problems, such as the air traffic system being overstressed, or Boeing losing the ability to build safe airplanes planes.
Pilots have a strong learning culture. When they screw up, they can die.
But external actors are not like that. The bu$ine$$men and politicians who would "improve" this system can afford to be reckless with other people's lives. They can sow chaos everywhere they go.
Maybe they would have us adopt something like the anything-goes banking culture that brought the Icelandic economy to its knees. Why not: their kind of people were the winners in that system! The little people faced the consequences.
MONEY is one of the biggest "target fixations" there is! Do I see an elephant in the room?
This could become a very long discussion.
Power (who has it) is a factor to consider. Maybe someone could map out where the power is.
I don't believe that it is actually that difficult to devise a plan that adequately covers just about all possible epidemic scenarios. If we don't have one, I stongly suspect it's because actually impressive people with the wherewithal and integrity to come up with such a plan are kept out of positions of influence by a system that prefers manipulative egomaniacs. The impressive people become civil servants or other technicians, while the egomaniacs neither understand nor really care about any such plan and therefore are unlikely to direct sufficient resources to one. The resources I have in mind include, maybe primarily, objectively low-value but indispensable ones like their own time, attention, status, media profile, etc.
That, if there is an issue, is probably what needs to be fixed. It is at least a systems problem that could probably in theory be solved.
«If we don't have one, I stongly suspect it's because actually impressive people with the wherewithal and integrity to come up with such a plan are kept out of positions of influence by a system that prefers manipulative egomaniacs [...] the egomaniacs neither understand nor really care about any such plan.»
A large minority of voters may be part of those "manipulative egomaniacs" (also known as "Middle England") whose main worry is to make money on their properties and investments and the devil may take the hindmost. As depicted by "The Economist": https://blissex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/polihousingoldpeoplebigmoney.jpg
Also:
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/dec/11/simon-hoggarts-week
“An old mining MP called Bill Stone, who used to sit in the corner of the Strangers' Bar drinking pints of Federation ale to dull the pain of his pneumoconiosis. He was eavesdropping on a conversation at the bar, where someone said exasperatedly about the Commons: "The trouble with this place is, it's full of c*nts!"
Bill put down his pint, wiped the foam from his lip and said: "They's plenty of c*nts in the country, and they deserve some representation." (To get the full effect, say it aloud in a broad northern accent.)
As a description of parliamentary democracy, that strikes me as unbeatable.”
So, are we in a comedy, or a tragedy?
Am reminded of Michael Lewis' books "The Fifth Risk" and "The Premonition." The real heroes are "nobodies."
Sucks-up suck their way up to the top. They come from the Dunning-Kruger hiring hall.
The real people have actual work to do, so naturally they get laid off in the name of economy, or for no reason at all. Shoulda played the game of politics better!
But Lewis quotes the football coach Bill Parcells: "You are what your record says you are."
I would add: when the Game of Life is over, you are stuck with your record. You cannot talk your way out of it.
Coincidence or not? Yesterday I drove past a small airport where 3 years ago a private jet took off from a short runway, 3,600 feet. Just legal if nothing weird happened. Well, the parking brake never fully released...they never got flying speed, went off the runway into a building, all 4 aboard died, 2 injured in the building.
The building they crashed into belongs to "Trumpf Inc," German-based company whose products include "fabricating machinery."
I was surprised to find no Kobayashi Maru reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
Seems to be pretty much what you're talking about: a test to see how a pilot fails, with no chance of success (unless you are Captain Kirk, I supoose), and very much not about finding a solution to the specific scenario.
«according to the Global Health Security Index, as of the start of 2020, the United Kingdom was the second-best prepared country in the world in terms of overall preparedness for a novel pathogen [...] target fixation is a huge risk in the otherwise useful and important exercise of scenario planning [...] some systems, including that of the UK, were incredibly well-drilled for a pathogen that behaved basically like flu.»
I read this blog because I like systems thinking and discussion of cognitive biases but sometimes I am simple minded and I think that politics and interests are more determinant in some cases. So first I will present the most important data about the COVID-19 pandemic, estimated death rated per million for some selected (in particular because of not too different age profiles) groups of countries:
#1 Peru 6,504; Bulgaria 5,663; Hungary 4,896
#2 UK 3,396; USA 3,331; Italy 3,243; Poland 3,001
#3 Russia 2,764; Bermuda 2,569, Sweden 2,347; Germany 2,098
#4 Finland 1,841; Iran 1,652; Israel 1,340; Norway 1,036
#5 Australia 901; New Zealand 642; Thailand 480; Vietnam 440; Singapore 332; China 85
What is most important is the enormous difference between group #5 and the other, in particular groups #2 and #3. This enormous difference is very obviously because the governments of the countries in group #5 adopted various forms of "test-trace-isolate" to contain contagion, while the government of countries in groups #2 and #3 adopted various half-baked forms of general lock-down.
As to the UK at the start of COVID-19 the well-prepared approach was "test-trace-isolate" as clearly recommended by the Chief Science Officer and the Chief Medical Officer (Vallance and Whitty) and the Johnson government started to award contracts to implement that approach. But that approach was cancelled and replaced with ahfl-baked general lock-downs with the full and committed support of Starmer's party.
Why did that happen? Because of cognitive biases like "target fixation"? Because of cybernetic system flaws?
I do not think think so; in my simplistic view I agree with an author who said it was because of ideology that is the deliberate rejection of the "collectivist" nature of public health measures and their incompatibility with "fatalistic liberalism" (largely overlapping with "thatcherism" or "methodological individualism"):
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/27/british-government-covid-strategy-virus-incompetence-ignorance-pandemic
“In a report released last December, the cross-party joint committee on national security strategy condemned the government for having “failed seriously to consider how it might scale up testing, isolation and contact-tracing capabilities during a serious disease outbreak” [...] this governing approach, which we call “fatalistic liberalism”, allows it to place the blame on the mix of public behaviour and natural causes. Risk appears to be the consequence of personal choice – people can decide whether to wear a mask or whether to get vaccinated – not the result of policy decisions made at the top”
Curiously the fairly right-wing anti-socialist governments of Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Singapore, China-Taiwan did use "test-trace-isolate" because it was well known to be the most effective.
«in my simplistic view I agree with an author who said it was because of ideology that is the deliberate rejection of the "collectivist" nature of public health measures and their incompatibility with "fatalistic liberalism" (largely overlapping with "thatcherism" or "methodological individualism")»
Here is a mention of an early sterling thatcherite/"methodologically individualist" argument during a long and hard campaign against "collectivist" public health programmes and here against building sewers for London:
https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/25705/1/Jeavons%2C%20Charlotte%20Ann_%20PhD%20thesis%20FINAL%20Corrected%20-%20July%202020_Redacted.pdf
“State action to improve public health was in its infancy in the 1800s and, although it had its champions, some affluent people in Victorian and Edwardian society were worried that Britain’s individualism and right to an autonomous life was being eroded through these collective means (Hatchet et al., 2012). [...] Objectors did not like this ‘highhanded’ and paternalistic approach and their view was reflected in an editorial in The Times [1854]:
‘We prefer to take our chances with cholera and the rest than be bullied into
health. There is nothing a man hates so much as being cleansed against his will [or having his floors swept, his walls whitewashed, his pet dung heaps cleared away, or his thatch forced to give way to slate] ... all at the command of a sort of sanitary bombaliff. [It is a positive fact that many have died of a good washing]’. (British Library, NDa)
Indeed, one such person was the Prime Minister, Disraeli (Warren, 2000). Disraeli’s libertarian view, and the view of many others at the time, was that poverty (which led to poor health), was due to both ignorance and a failure of character [...]
British Library (no date) Opponents to sanitary reform. Available at:
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/publichealth/sources/source17/economist.html (Accessed 18 May 2016)”
«[....] China-Taiwan did use "test-trace-isolate" because it was well known to be the most effective.»
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/29/asia/taiwan-covid-19-intl-hnk/
“Authorities activated the island's Central Epidemic Command Center, which was set up in the wake of SARS, to coordinate between different ministries. The government also ramped up face mask and protective equipment production to make sure there would be a steady supply of PPE. The government also invested in mass testing and quick and effective contact tracing. Former Taiwanese Vice President Chen Chien-jen, who is an epidemiologist by training, said lockdowns are not ideal. Chen also said that the type of mass-testing schemes undertaken in mainland China, where millions of people are screened when a handful of cases are detected, are also unnecessary. "Very careful contact tracing, and very stringent quarantines of close contacts are the best way to contain Covid-19," he said.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-29/this-place-hasn-t-had-a-local-coronavirus-case-in-200-days
"What did this island of 23 million people do right? It has had 553 confirmed cases, with only seven deaths. Experts say closing borders early and tightly regulating travel have gone a long way toward fighting the virus. Other factors include rigorous contact tracing, technology-enforced quarantine and widespread mask wearing. [...] Also, as it’s not easy to make people stay in quarantine, Taiwan has taken steps to provide meal and grocery delivery and even some friendly contact via Line Bot, a robot that texts and chats. There is also punishment -- those who break quarantine face fines of up to NT$1million ($35,000). [...] Taiwan has world-class contact tracing -- on average, linking 20 to 30 contacts to each confirmed case. In extreme situations, such as that of a worker at a Taipei City hostess club who contracted the virus, the government tracked down as many as 150 contacts. Then, all contacts must undergo a 14-day home quarantine, even if they test negative.”
But that is... COLLECTIVISM! :-) And as we all know it never worked and never will:
IB Times 2021/01/09 ("Taiwan Reports 3% GDP Growth In Pandemic-hit 2020, Beating China")
“Taiwan Reports 3% GDP Growth In Pandemic-hit 2020, Beating China</i>”
Taiwan News 2021/02/09 ("<i>Taiwan's exports grow for 7th straight month in January")
“Exports jumped 36.8 percent from a year earlier to US$34.27 billion in January, the highest monthly figure on record, according to data compiled by the ministry. The MOF attributed the growth to surging exports in the rising field of remote work applications, as well as traditional exports and a low comparison base compared with January 2020, when the Lunar New Year holiday cut short the number of business days, the data indicated. On a month-to-month basis, Taiwan's outbound sales also rose 3.9 percent in January, the data indicated.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/a-guide-to-2021-covid-vaccines-stimulus-sanity
“The flailing in Washington and state capitals looks even worse when juxtaposed with the success of China, which clamped down on Covid with compulsory mask wearking isolation of the sick, and effective contact tracing. Chinese are blithely eating in restaurants, sitting in theaters, attending school, and going back to work. On Jan. 18 the government reported GDP grew 2.3% in 2020, which makes China the only major economy to to avoid a contraction for the year. Exports helped: they rose 18% in December from a year earlier despite slow demand growth abroad because Chinese exporters grabbed market share from foreign rivals."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54504785
“The Chinese city of Qingdao is testing its entire population of nine million people for Covid-19 over a period of five days. The mass testing comes after the discovery of a dozen cases linked to a hospital treating coronavirus patients arriving from abroad. In May, China tested the entire city of Wuhan - home to 11 million people and the epicentre of the global pandemic. The country has largely brought the virus under control. That is in stark contrast to other parts of the world, where there are still high case numbers and lockdown restrictions of varying severity. In a statement posted to Chinese social media site Weibo, Qingdao's Municipal Health Commission said six new cases and six asymptomatic cases had been discovered.”
«As to the UK at the start of COVID-19 the well-prepared approach was "test-trace-isolate" as clearly recommended by the Chief Science Officer and the Chief Medical Officer (Vallance and Whitty)»
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/england-coronavirus-testing-has-not-risen-fast-enough-science-chief
“Sir Patrick Vallance says testing needs to be done at scale to find outbreaks and isolate people [...] Sir Patrick Vallance’s comments echo those of Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, who said a week ago that Germany “got ahead” in testing people for Covid-19 and that the UK needed to learn from that. So far, the government has prioritised tests for seriously ill patients in hospital and frontline NHS staff. But Vallance said testing needed to be done at sufficient scale “to look at outbreaks and isolate”, as has happened in countries such as Germany and South Korea. “I think at the beginning Public Health England [PHE] got off to a good start in terms of testing to try and make sure they caught people coming into the country with it,” he told ITV’s weekly Coronavirus Q&A show. “I then think it’s not scaled as fast as it needs to scale – and that’s being done now. But I do think testing is an incredibly important bit of this. It needs to be done at scale, and it needs to be able to be done rapidly enough to look at outbreaks and isolate.” [...] When asked why Germany – which in the week ending 4 April was carrying out an average of 116,655 swab tests a day – had been able to test so many people and keep deaths relatively low, Vallance said testing was “an incredibly important part of how we need to manage this going forward”. However, he added, there were “all sorts of reasons” why Germany had had only 3,194 deaths at that time, compared with 11,329 in UK hospitals, cautioning that its high volume of testing should not be automatically linked with the low death toll.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/04/eight-lessons-controlling-coronavirus-east-asian-nations-pandemic-public-health
“We are now almost four months into this pandemic, and the lessons that can be drawn from east Asian countries on how best to control this coronavirus and keep daily new cases as low as possible are clear. [...]
The first is to aggressively identify where the virus is and break chains of transmission. This requires a “test, trace, isolate” policy that involves mass community testing, tracing those who had been in contact in the previous week with any individual testing positive, and putting all of those individuals into a mandatory quarantine. Governments and local municipalities would have to recruit and train foot soldiers to carry this out. While testing itself is not a solution, it is a crucial part of a package of public health interventions needed to keep identifying clusters of infection and breaking these apart.
The third is to keep constant surveillance of the virus using tracking systems to detect whether certain parts of the country are becoming hotspots and whether sub-populations, such as migrants living in close quarters, have a higher incidence of the virus. [...]
The seventh lesson is that lockdowns, if introduced early and quickly, can slow the spread of the virus, but are not a solution by themselves. They are a costly and crude policy instrument that should be used as sparingly as possible. They allow governments to buy time and use this time to massively increase important public health infrastructure.”
The whole real stress test, and stress testing reminds me of one of my favorite ideas recently, coming out of software architecture - Residuality theory. It is an amazing way to deal with actual real stress tests in a way that is backed by complexity science.
Interesting that it sounds like the UK and USA and likely other countries did the AI equivalent of over fitting towards very specific pandemics in their planning.
But I also don't think that many countries were really ready for a global pandemic. I think most were aiming for an Ebola outbreak like scenario on the deadly side but one which was somewhat easier to contain. A truly prepared country would have had a lot more PPE in reserve.
But protective equipment doesn't last forever. Medicines, even face masks have to be replaced eventually.
Even multivitamins degrade way faster than you expect (only lasting a year or two).
I suspect Asian countries had both more authoritarian control but also more actual experience with previous incidents like H1N1 and other outbreaks.
Hence containing the situation somewhat better. They were better at the hammer and the dance that came with COVID.
I should TLDR my response.
The medical staff in UK and USA might have been ready, but the population weren't.
There's also issues with it becoming political and it coincided with the social media based schizm of people down political lines, whilst racism and other issues were still at the forefront.
I'm USA especially, it didn't help that what the politicians said contradicted what the scientists said and that new science also contradicted previous recommendations. Which in hindsight were probably based on previously run scenarios that fit close enough but turned out they weren't quite right.
On top of that it was a mutating and changing virus.
But I will say that the people at the coal face, those researching COVID and those medical professionals finding themselves having to deal with it all. They did really well with it all. A fast analysis and vaccine. Fast use of face masks and people came to the table with face shields and the countries which quickly implemented harsh shutdowns ended up doing pretty well from what I could tell.
I think for me the most disturbing thing about the saga is that not only did coronavirus spread largely through the air, in the process of experimenting with what that means we learned that flu spreads through the air more than had been thought... and... we've done very little with that knowledge. As such, while I appreciate the idea that we shouldn't get fixated, I'd still feel a little more comfortable if we looked more able to learn lessons from 2020-21.
I'll note in passing as well that the GHSI didn't reckon with the undermining of systems via Osbornomics - a statement which applies distressingly well to large parts of the British state (local government anyone?)