Left to our own devices, we tend to think that what happens every decade in fact only happens once every century, and, furthermore, that we know what’s going on.
Donald Trump keeps mentioning the Spanish Flu from 1917 to 1918. I'm reading "The Great Influenza" which is about the Spanish Flu. It was published in 2004. It references a "recent study" which found there had been a flu epidemic for 19 of the last 33 years. They killed from a few thousand to forty thousand just in the United States.
Given this context, is COVID-19 really a Black Swan? We could have predicted it. I think the government did an excellent job responding. Was it precisely the correct level of concern? Don't be silly. There is no such thing. THey did the best they could with the information they had at the time.
