Lessons from COVID-19: How a science- and partnership-driven approach to risk can win the battle
May 21, 2020 by Christian Mumenthaler
f we liken the COVID-19 crisis to fighting a war, then we’re confronting an invisible enemy that multiplies exponentially on the battlefield. All of our lives have been changed in the last weeks and some of us have even lost family members, friends or colleagues.
Some people have called this event a “black swan” – the concept of something that cannot be predicted from Nassim Taleb’s famous book. But it isn’t a black swan. Pandemics have always existed and will probably always exist, and sometimes a virus more dangerous than others will emerge. They regularly do, as in the famous Spanish flu of 1918, or other severe flus in the 1950s (Asian flu) and 1960s (Hong Kong flu) of the last century which killed millions of people worldwide. With our lives that have generally become much safer, we tend to forget that we basically do not yet have a “miracle cure” for new viruses, but still rely on the same method which was used a hundred years ago: the development of a vaccine, which is a slow and difficult process, with no success guarantees.
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