If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
It’s hard to imagine that the world will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic without undergoing significant changes, and given that it’s hard to focus on anything else at the moment, I thought I’d write about some of those potential changes, as a way of talking about the thing we’re all focused on, but in a manner that’s less obsessed with the minutiae of what’s happening right this minute.
To begin with there’s the issue of patience I mentioned in my last post. My first prediction is that special COVID-19 measures will still be in force two years from now, though not necessarily continuously. Meaning I’m not predicting that the current social distancing rules will still be in place two years from now, the prediction is more that two years from now you’ll still be able to read about an area that has reinstituted them after a local outbreak. Or to put it another way, COVID-19 will provoke significantly more worry than the flu even two years from now.
My next prediction is that some industries will never recover to their previous levels. In order of most damaged to least damaged these would be:
- Commercial Realty: From where I sit this seems like the perfect storm for commercial realty. You’ve got a generalized downturn that’s affecting all businesses. Then you have the demise of WeWork (the largest office tenant in places like NYC) which was already in trouble and now has stopped paying many of it’s leases. But, on top of all of that you have numerous businesses who have just been forced into letting people work from home and some percentage of those individuals and companies are going to realize it works better and for less money. I’m predicting a greater than 20% decrease in the value of commercial real estate by the time it’s all over.
- Movie theaters: I’m predicting 15% of movie theaters will never come back. More movies will have a digital only release, and such releases will get more marketing.
- Cruises: The golden age of cruises is over. I’m predicting whatever the cruise industry made in 2019 that it will be a long time before we see that amount again. (I’m figuring around a decade.)
- Conventions: I do think they will fully recover, but I predict that for the big conventions it will be 2023 before they regain their 2019 attendance numbers.
- Sports: I’m not a huge sports fan, so I’m less confident about a specific prediction, but I am predicting that sports will look different in some significant way. For example lower attendance, drop in value of sports franchises, leagues which never recover, etc. At a minimum I’m predicting that IF the NFL season starts on time it will do it without people in attendance at the stadiums.
As you can tell most of these industries are ones that pack a large number of people together for a significant period of time, and regardless of whether I’m correct on every specific prediction, I see no way around the conclusion that large gatherings of people will be the last thing to return to a pre-pandemic normal.
One thing that would help speed up this return to normalcy is if there’s a push to eventually test everyone, which is another prediction I made a while back, though I think it was on Twitter. (I’m dipping my toe in that lake, but it’s definitely not my preferred medium, however if you want to follow me I’m @Jeremiah820) When I say test everyone, I’m not saying 100%, or even 95%, but I’m talking about mass testing, where we’re doing orders of magnitude more than we’re doing right now. Along the lines of what’s proposed in this Manhattan Program for Testing article.
Of course one problem with doing that is coming up with the necessary reagents, and while this prediction is somewhat at odds with the last prediction, it seems to be ever more clear that when it comes down to it, the pandemic is a logistical problem. And that long term harm is going to mostly come from the delay in getting or being able to produce what we need. For example the fact that our mask supply was outsourced to Southeast Asian, and most of our drug manufacturing has been outsourced to there and India, and most of our antibiotics are made in China and Lombardy Italy (yeah the area that was hit the hardest). The biggest problem with testing everyone appears to be getting the necessary reagents, I’m not sure where the bottleneck is there, but that’s obviously one of the biggest ones of all. In theory you should be seeing an exponential increase in the amount of testing similar to the exponential growth of the number of diagnosis (since ever diagnosis needs a test) but instead the testing statistics are pretty lumpy, and in my own state, after an initial surge the number of tests being done has slipped back to the level they were two weeks ago.
Thus far we mostly talked about the immediate impact of the pandemic with its associated lockdown, but I’m also very interested in what the world looks like after things have calmed down. (I hesitate to use the phrase “returned to normal” because it’s going to be a long time before that happens.) I already mentioned in my last post that I think this is going to have a significant impact on US-China relations, and in case it wasn’t clear I’m predicting that they’ll get worse. As to how exactly they will get worse, I predict that on the US side the narrative that it’s all China’s fault will become more and more entrenched, with greater calls to move manufacturing out of China, and more support for Trump’s tariffs. On the Chinese side, I expect they’re going to try and take advantage of the weakness (perceived or real, it’s hard to say) of the US and Europe to sew up their control of the South China Sea, and maybe make more significant moves towards re-incorporating Taiwan.
Turning to more domestic concerns, I expect that we’ll spend at least a little more money on preparedness, though it will still be entirely overwhelmed (by several orders of magnitude) by the money we’re spending trying to cure the problem after it’s happened rather than preventing it before it does. Also I fear that we’ll fall into the traditional trap where we’re well prepared for the last crisis, but then actually end up spending less money on other potential crises. As a concrete prediction I think the budget for the CDC will go up, but that budgets for things like nuclear non-proliferation and infrastructure hardening against EMPs, etc. will remain flat or actually go down.
Also on the domestic front, this is more of a hope than a prediction, but I would expect that there will be a push towards having more redundancy. That we will see greater domestic production of certain critical emergency supplies, perhaps tax credits for maintaining surge capacity (as I mentioned in a previous post), and possibly even an antitrust philosophy which is less about predatory monopolies, and more about making industries robust. That we will work to make things a little less efficient in exchange for making them less fragile
From here we move on to more fringe issues, though in spite of their fringe character these next couple of predictions are actually the ones I feel the most confident about. To start with I have some predictions to make concerning the types of conspiracy theories this crisis will spawn. Now obviously, because of the time in which we live, there are already a whole host of conspiracy theories about COVID-19. But my prediction is that when things finally calm down that there will be one theory in particular which will end up claiming the bulk of the attention. The theory that COVID-19 was a conspiracy to allow the government to significantly increase its power and in particular its ability to conduct surveillance. As far as specifics the number of people who currently identify as “truthers” (9/11 conspiracy theorists) currently stands at 20% I predict that the number of COVID conspiracy theorists will be at least 30%.
But civil libertarians are not the only ones who see more danger in the response to the pandemic than in the pandemic itself. I’m also noticing that a surprising number of Christians view it as a huge threat to religion as well. With many of them feeling that the declaration of churches as “non-essential” is very troubling just on it’s face, and that furthermore it’s a violation of the First Amendment. This mostly doesn’t include Mormons, and we were in fact one of the first denominations to shut everything down. But despite this I do have a certain amount of sympathy for the position, particularly if the worst accusations turn out to be true. Despite my sympathies I am in total agreement that megachurches should not continue conducting meetings, that in fact meetings in general over a few people are a bad idea. But consider this claim:
Christian churches worldwide have suffered the greatest, most catastrophic blow in their entire history, and – such is the feebleness of modern faith – have barely noticed (and barely even protested).
There are many enforced closures and lock-downs of many institutions and buildings in England now; but there are none, I think, so severe and so absolute as the lock-down of Church of England churches.
Take a look for yourself – browse around.
The instructions make clear that nobody should enter a church building, not even the vicar (even the church yard is supposed to be locked) – except in the case of some kind of material emergency like a gas leak. And, of course: all Christian activities must cease.
This is specifically directed at the church’s Christian activities. As a telling example, a funeral can be conducted in secular buildings, but the use of church buildings for a religious funeral is explicitly forbidden.
Except, wait for it… Church buildings can be used for non-Christian activities – such as blood donation, food banks or as night shelters…
English churches are therefore – by official decree – now deconsecrated shells.
Church buildings are specifically closed for all religious activities – because these are allegedly too dangerous to allow; but at the same time churches are declared to be safe-enough, and allowed to remain open, for various ‘essential’ secular activities.
What could be clearer than that?
I’ve looked at the link, and the claims seem largely true, though sensationalized, and in some cases it looks like the things banned by the Church of England were banned by the state a few days later. But you can see where it might seem like churches are being especially singled out for additional restrictions. And, while I’m sympathetic. I do not think this means that there’s some sort of wide-ranging conspiracy. But this doesn’t mean that other people won’t, and conspiracy theories have been created from evidence more slender than this. (Also stuff like this PVP Comic doesn’t help.) Which leads to another prediction, the pandemic will worsen relations between Christians (especially evangelicals) and mainstream governmental agencies (the bureaucracy and more middle of the road candidates).
A metric for whether this comes to pass is somewhat difficult to specify, but insofar as Trump is seen as out of the mainstream, and as bucking consensus as far as the pandemic, one measure might be if his share of the evangelical vote goes up. Though I agree there could be lots of reasons for that. Which is to say I feel pretty confident in this prediction, but I wouldn’t blame you if you questioned whether I had given you enough for it to truly be graded.
Finally, in a frightening combination of fringe concerns, eschatology, things with low probability, and apocalyptic pandemics, we arrive at my last prediction. But first an observation, have you noticed how many stories there have been about the reduction in pollution and greenhouse gases as a result of the pandemic? If you have, does it give you any ideas? Was one of those ideas, “Man, if I was a radical environmentalist, I think I’d seriously consider engineering a pandemic just like this one as a way of saving the planet!”? No? Maybe it’s just me that had this idea, but let’s assume that in a world of seven billion people more than one person would have had this idea.
Certainly, even before the pandemic, there was a chance that someone would intentionally engineer a pandemic, and I don’t think I’m stretching things too much to imagine that a radical environmentalist might be the one inclined to do it, though you could also imagine someone from the voluntary human extinction movement deciding to start an involuntary human extinction movement via this method. My speculation would be that seeing COVID-19 with its associated effects on pollution and greenhouse gases has made this scenario more likely.
How likely? Still unlikely, but more likely than we’re probably comfortable with. A recent book by Toby Ord, titled The Precipice (which I have yet to read but plan to soon) is entirely devoted to existential risks. And Ord gives an engineered pandemic a 1 in 30 chance of wiping out all of humanity in the next 100 years. From this conclusion two questions follow, the first, closely related to my prediction: These odds were assigned before the pandemic, have they gone up since then? And the second question: if there’s a 1 in 30 chance of an engineered pandemic killing EVERYONE, what are the chances of a pandemic which is 10x worse than COVID-19, but doesn’t kill everyone. Less than 1 in 30 just by the nature of compound probability. But is it 1 in 10? 1 in 5?
My prediction doesn’t concern those odds. My prediction is about whether someone will make an attempt. This attempt might end up being stopped by the authorities, or it might be equivalent to the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway, or it might be worse than COVID-19. My final prediction is that in the next 20 years there is a 20% chance that someone will attempt to engineer a disease with the intention of dramatically reducing the number of humans. Let’s hope that I’m mistaken.
For those who care about such things I would assign a confidence level of 75% for all of the other predictions except the two about conspiracy theories, my confidence level there is 90%. My confidence level that someone will become a donor based on this message is 10%, so less than the chances of an artificial plague, and once again, I hope I’m wrong.
I noticed you left out church services. My meditation group has moved to zoom, but now I notice I’m not limited geographically. Meetup groups out of NYC no longer look like a headache to me since I could zoom into them. Why not hit even more distant geographically.
Where does this leave ‘mega-churches’? I suspect the answer is ‘pretty f’d’. These enterprises are basically less financially sophisticated cruise ships. The refusal of some of them to close, I think, is less about theological obligation or freedom of religion protests as it is about “how am I going to make the mortgage payment on my 7 cars” type concerns.
I think there’s some interesting potential here. Mega-churches are following the Youtube model where the top performer gets an insane amount of views, but true interpersonal connection is impossible with them (feel free to say Hi to Jordan Peterson in the Youtube comments on one of his talks). Zoom, however, favors smaller meetings…say 10-20, but are quite intimate at that level. Perhaps a Zoom based Church would be lots of meetups with an organization appointing clerics authorized to run them. Amway might be a model here.
I agree movies are out. I kind of feel they were struggling anyway. TV’s at home can mimic the quality of movies. I remember seeing the last Star Wars movie in 3-d IMAX but it seemed like this was less about what the art demanded and more about trying to find ways to keep movie theaters relevant.
Never really got cruise ships to begin with. But then the Titanic didn’t kill the industry, some types of bad taste have achieved effective immorality.
Testing – One trick is group testing. Take samples from, say, ten people mix them together. Then do the test. If it is negative you’ve cleared 10 people in one shot. If it is positive, divide into groups of 5 and repeat.
Not sure we need to test everyone, one advantage is when the curve bends down you can be more targeted in your testing. A problem here is testing is just a spot. I could be negative today but positive tomorrow.
Speaking of which, a long while ago I remember watching a documentary about the porn industry (maybe it was on Showtime, who knows?). Funny thing as AIDS started becoming a thing, they stayed free of it for quite a while. Much longer than you would expect given the amount of unprotected sex they were having each month with so many people. They were actually a pretty close-knit group and they remained virus free for quite a while, long enough to have a false sense of security. Of course once one person got it, it spread very fast through the network.
Perhaps this could be combined. Imagine a grocery store has 50 workers, once a month they do 5 tests. A positive triggers a store clean down and more tests to isolate the positive. The positive person(s) is sent home but with special bonus pay so no one has the incentive to try to hide their status because they have bills to pay. Public health could then get involved to contact trace that person and deploy tests to find people outside the grocery store.
This, though, is not going to work with the current GOP. This demands a safety net that is not tied to low wage people always working and hustling. If you don’t provide one it isn’t going to happen unless all retail is going to shift to just Amazon and Walmart.
I actually don’t think manufacturing is going to move around that much. The shortages of PPE and reagents is sudden demand. The world supply chains keep underwear on our butts, it can easily supply us with a few boxes of N95 masks per month. IMO hospitals have not been well incentivized when it comes to infection control. They make their money off of procedures, not general public health. Except for a few attempts to stop it under Obamacare, they actually get paid more if you get an infection at a hospital. Imagine that setup anywhere else. “You took your car in for an oil change but your windshield got cracked while it was in our shop so now you owe us for that repair too”. If the SOP in hospitals is to use PPE all the time, there will never be a shortage again.
Conspiracy theories:
Several have been brewing. The political sponsored one is that the virus is engineered. Trump supporters are claiming it was engineered by China and either escaped by accident or was released on purpose. China, likewise, has their own sycophants spreading the same theory except blames the US. It’s a theory that can be adapted as needed without proof since it’s just as easy to imagine a CIA agent release a virus in Wuhan to make it look like the virus escaped in Wuhan and vice versa….
The other big one is 5G. Apparently there was already a 5G conspiracy group so they’ve just expanded to claim there is no virus but 5G towers are having medical effects on people and ‘they’ are blaming the virus. (Or a variation is 5G is lowering immune systems making people more vulnerable to the virus).
I suspect Christian based conspiracy theories will be hard to find a niche. First off, at least in the US, many pastors got heir special exemptions, esp. in the Bible belt. It’s pretty difficult to claim the gov’t is oppressing you while your man is in the White House. Second, the people who push conspiracy theories are not typically the ones who are entrusted to manage churches. I suspect the few high profile pastors trying to flout shutdowns have celebrity but not much credibility among Christians (Jerry Falwell Jr. for example). This would require the Christian conspiracy theorist to push a conspiracy on behalf of major Christian Churches but at odds with the leadership of those churches who are mostly in favor of shutdowns as well. Which means they would have to accuse the leaders of being in on the conspiracy….but then if you’re going to say the leaders of big Church are in on an anti-Christian conspiracy then why is it bad big Church services are closed? Sooner or later even the most incoherent need to bend the knee to some measure of coherence.
Another area that’s floundered I think are libertarians. You would think ‘gov’t control’ would be just their ticket but I sense that too falls flat. Only a libertarian could think making fast food switch to drive-thru only is the culmination of an Emperor Palpatine level plot to acquire ‘unlimited POWER ahhhhh!!!’.
But one 2nd level play I think you might want to consider are anti-vaxers. They have gone surprisingly quiet these days….although I’ve seen a few claiming Bill Gates is behind the whole thing to sell vaccines. But here’s the thing, vaccines are not automatically safe. Some are actually a bit dangerous. There’s a reason we all are encouraged to get flu shots but they keep the ebola vaccine limited to outbreaks, for now at least. I could see a half-assed covid vaccine get rushed through with abbreviated testing, and then start causing problems. This could give the anti-vaccine movement a second wind. On the other hand if there’s no vaccine for a long while and we defeat the virus more or less with shutdowns and social distancing. I could imagine flu and other disease taking a nose dive as well. Therein their comeback could be “see we don’t really need vaccines after all”.
So maybe short anti-vaxxers for short term but go long on them in the long.
Not sure about that last point. Are you claiming anti-vaxxers would advocate in favor of draconian social distancing and shutdowns over vaccination??
I had a chance to chat with an anti-vaxxer in California. He insisted that the ‘real’ problem with vaccines is [something something] hygiene hypothesis. We went over the peer reviewed data from PubMed together, but he never accepted that his claim has been tested already and failed to produce support. His claim was that it’s not the vaccine itself, but the failure to get the infection in the first place that is causing increased autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases. That means he’s basically claiming herd immunity is bad, and that young children (less than 1 years old) should be proactively infected with deadly pathogens.
In other words, to the anti-vaxx community, it’s not enough to just avoid vaccination. You also need to proactively put children’s lives in danger to get the ‘benefits’ they’re after.
I suspect the anti-vaxx community will not give up but they may shrink or expand. If a vaccine is rushed in and causes harm or is ineffective, they will, of course, pounce on that as an I told you so moment. If a vaccine is available a year and a half from now, they will point out social distancing worked and solutions that are not as invasive of your body like wearing masks are more ‘natural’. For an anti-vaxxer a nightmare would be if a vaccine somehow was approved now and somehow was widely available soon and worked great with few side effects. I suspect the anti-vaxxer response, after a while, would be to claim the virus was staged as a scheme to sell vaccines.
I try to refrain from making someone’s worst arguments for them. However, I would agree that the movement’s founding is rooted in motivated reasoning. “Vaccines are bad for you” is the foregone conclusion, and the justification is whatever it needs to be in order to arrive at that place.
I hadn’t heard the 5G conspiracy theory. That’s an interesting one. Do you have a link?
As far as libertarians, surprisingly I have a different take on that. I feel like by inclination I’m pretty libertarian (i.e. when I was young and less acquainted with the complexities of the world, I defaulted to libertarian) and yet I’ve been surprised at the level of resistance to cell-phone tracking, and the number of people who feel like certain measures aren’t even worth trying in America. Overall I’ve been surprised by the level of libertarianism which I’m seeing.
As far as the anti-vaxers I had a similar thought, though more along the lines wondering where the safety/speed division was going to be made. Also I’m hearing that coronavirus may be particularly difficult to vaccinate against.
I think Chinese gov’t cell phone tracking would be resisted by libertarians and most regular Americans. But on the other hand I could see the opposite. A sort of free market tracking where you download an app, upload your temperature each day and agree to share test results. If you test positive the app will send a warning to those who also have the app that you came close too to get tested, without telling them you were the person. You could also do what the NYT did and just buy the cell phone location data of spring breakers and then see where they ended up. You won’t get precision tracking down to the person but you probably could target hot spots.
Libertarians IMO have done very badly. They downplayed the virus because their ideology can’t really cope with it. They protested and resisted even minor shutdowns. Was it the Lt. Gov. of Texas who went on TV and ‘volunteered’ everyone’s grandmother to die for the sake of the stock market? That’s not going to age well, nor will Ron Paul infecting all his fellow Senators because he thought it was ‘mind your own business’ to socialize as he was waiting for test results. Long story short if “What would Ayn Rand Do” is the type of thing you ask yourself, you probably looked bad. (That’s asking, the actual answer was “get on government Medicare and have them pay the bills as I keep smoking three packs a day because it’s ‘objectively good’ or something like that”).
Hmmm, I’m seeing a few problems with your Christian Church complaints.
1. You’re talking about England, not the US. The UK doesn’t have the First Amendment perspective towards Church-State relations that the US does.
2. “I’ve looked at the link, and the claims seem largely true, though sensationalized, and in some cases it looks like the things banned by the Church of England were banned by the state a few days later. ”
OK so are you saying the Church of England put these rules on itself first and then the gov’t follow later? How is that the state imposing on the Church?
Making this even less viable as an argument, the Queen is both head of state and head of the Church of England. Anyone that doesn’t like state mixed with their Church wouldn’t be in the Church of England.
3. “There are many enforced closures and lock-downs of many institutions and buildings in England now; but there are none, I think, so severe and so absolute as the lock-down of Church of England churches.
Take a look for yourself – browse around.
The instructions make clear that nobody should enter a church building, not even the vicar (even the church yard is supposed to be locked) ”
OK maybe the link has been updated since you looked at it but one of the items I see is the site offering a list of Churches that are Livestreaming services. This would contradict what you say is the ‘mostly true’ claim that the vicar cannot even enter a Church unless it’s to check on gas leaks.
Also the complaint that shelters and blood drives are allowed is oddly spun as a ‘secularization’ of Churches when in fact it seems to be the opposite.
Blood drives are, of course, conducted by health care professionals so they would have to be done in a way that minimizes the virus spreading. And they may turn out to be super essential since blood transfusions might have a role to play in treatment and we might otherwise have shortages.
Shelters being allowed seems to me to be less rather than more secular restriction on the Churches. Churches are already providing shelter to some people. The gov’t saying they aren’t going to force the Churches to stop that is less, not more gov’t interference with Churches. It’s also quite practical since if Churches had to kick out people who were sheltering there, that would just add to the population of people who could not properly shelter in place.
For this chap to spin this as gov’t imposing on the Churches seems backwards and seeking attention by victimization mongering to me. Also it’s a bit of a slight on Christianity. It’s not like running a shelter is some secular sideshow, like a Bingo game for the old folks, is it?
To be clear they’re not my complaints. I said I was sympathetic to the idea that the government and even the churches themselves have done very little to defend the “essentialness” of churches. Mostly I was posting to express a certain degree of surprise, about how apocalyptically some people view things. Including the guy I linked to. I certainly don’t view it as being quite so calamitous.
It’s possible the UK might be a different story, I’m speaking from the the US pov where it seems the Churches have mostly been positive with a few notable exceptions. The more Red states, have, of course, not done as well here. Rhetorically ‘essential’ might not be the best word as it implies some type of value judgment such as the auto repair shop is ‘better’ than the Church when in fact it’s simply where are areas of intense virus transmission potential versus what could be stopped. Bars get shut down but liquor stores stay open since they can sell keeping social distance protocols. (There’s also a concern that forcing serious alcoholics to cold turkey could create a mini-health crises on its own).
Your look at the Church of England seemed to miss the odd part that it was the Church itself and not the gov’t that decided to shutdown. That plus your own source seemed to contradict the assertion that no one was allowed in the Church. They are apparently zooming services.
You also missed the potential cheap shot. You could have said no anti-Christian conspiracy would shut down the Church of England as its an institution that seems to have been deconverting more Christians than converting for quite a while now.
Final thought on engineered viruses. I’ve been looking and I think this remains more sci-fi than fact. Can anyone identify:
1. Any example of a genetically engineered virus to be used as weapon? The only example I think we ever had is a modified form of HIV that is used in some types of genetic engineering.
2. Bioweapons in general are kind of rare. There’s anthrax, typhoid, and small pox ‘blankets’. The first was used by the anthrax mail terrorist after 9/11. The other two had some limited uses in history. But even in the past chemical weapons seemed to have more use than bioweapons. Anthrax looks more like a chemical weapon than a bioweapon.
Why might this be? Well I think we have the following problems:
1. Bioweapons tend to work slowly and cannot be easily contained. As military weapons that makes them a problem. They also tend to kill the older and sicker more than younger and healthier. Not helpful for an army commander seeking an edge.
2. As terrorism there’s a tradeoff between spreading and killing. Something that kills a lot tends to stop spreading very quickly.
Engineering has some serious problems:
1. Viruses tend to evolve as soon as you let them out in the wild. The traits you engineer into them will soon be lost in genetic drift unless there’s also selection pressure to preserve them.
2. Viruses that infect humans tend to evolve in the direction of being less deadly. Again once you release your engineered virus, it will tend to become less of a problem if left to its own devices.
3. There’s no way to engineer viruses without testing on live humans. There is no blueprint or code book that says if you put gene A on a virus it will cause X in humans. But much like drug development, it’s really just guesses, sometimes educated sometimes not. Drugs that work in the test tube and animal pan out in humans and vice versa. At least with drugs there’s some type of road map….receptors that we are targeting or modes of operation. Doing rounds of properly done live studies on human victims makes the effort to engineer a viral bioweapon problematic.
4. The other side here is if we could build an atom by atom simulation of a human body perhaps we could design a virus that does what we want to it and know it will work without having to test it on humans. This is all well and good but if we had this type of computing power then designing drugs and vaccines on the fly would be even easier.
I think aside from some known viruses that already exist like small pox, you’re not going to see much in terms viral bioweapons for decades.
I mentioned this idea to a group I was having a virtual meetup with on Saturday, and one of them said that he thought the chances of a nation engaging in biowarfare had dropped. I agree with that, but also for all the reasons you mention I think that chance was always very low.
But, recall I’m talking about something very different. Leaving ideology aside for the moment, let’s just assume that someone wanted to significantly reduce the number of humans. In particular let’s assume they’re part of a group which doesn’t even value their own life, well then most of your engineering problems have answers:
1- You could hold on to some of the base virus, and reintroduce it when you want, you could even “launch” it from multiple cities. Imagine if everywhere looked like Italy all at the same time?
2- Basically the same answer as 1.
3- You could test it on members of the group. This isn’t perfect, but in between this and starting with something with known virulence, I think you’d be off to a pretty good start.
4- Perhaps, but it’s ALWAYS easier to destroy than to create, regardless of the tech…
It’s probably not as hard as you might think to engineer your own bioweapon. As Boonton points out, the ever-present problem with bioweapons is how poorly targeted they tend to be; which is why they’re so impractical. All the conspiracies about how this or that government might have released SARS2 are bogus, because a government would never do something with such a high probability of blow back. It would be nearly impossible to engineer something that kills Hutus but leaves Tutsis alone (or insert your favorite rivalry). But if you don’t care about blow back that’s a different matter altogether. Then it’s just a question of whether you can pull together enough funds to make it happen.
I’m pretty sure the sequence to smallpox is publicly available. To re-engineer the virus, it wouldn’t be too difficult to order the sequence in pieces (custom gene synthesis is shipped to your door at ambient temperatures in a few days; depending on the sequence it’s a few cents per base pair), and then assemble them on your own. A reasonably competent individual could set up their own lab on the cheap and probably have a working smallpox virus inside a couple of years even if they’re teaching themselves a lot of the underlying molecular biology techniques. I know there’s a vibrant community of DIY molecular biology enthusiasts out there who would provide valuable assistance on forums – so long as they don’t realize what the overall project they’re helping is working toward. The techniques themselves aren’t that hard or particularly expensive, and there are always off-the-shelf kits you can order to simplify everything and make it quick. A lot of the basic lab equipment is fairly cheap on Ebay, then just grab your supplies from Fischer. (You can buy an electron microscope on Ebay for a fraction of the price it would cost from a vendor! Don’t think I haven’t considered it…)
I’d say you could easily do it for under a million dollars, maybe a few a hundred thousand if you know more about what you’re doing and don’t have to learn through practice. In other words, the average disgruntled fifty-something who is willing to cash in his retirement to become a notorious mass murderer might be able to pull this off. A biology undergrad could easily do it, and a molecular biology grad student or lab tech wouldn’t even find it difficult. The real barrier is the technical know-how, but honestly it’s not that hard and with all the convenient tools available today it has never been easier.
That’s what it would take to create really nasty bioweapons out of known pathogens, like smallpox. There are a lot of nasty pathogens whose sequences are publicly available. There are a few you could craft that way, then just aerosolize and distribute in a major international airport or two. Not sure why nobody has done it yet (other than the fact that it’s an elaborate way to commit suicidal domestic/international terrorism), but whatever the reason I hope our luck holds out as the barriers keep diminishing.
I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to use smallpox for that type of attack. It’s a known entity and since it can only infect humans you have some ability to shut it down. Just surround it with vaccinated people and the virus will go extinct. Problem is that it’s currently extinct although as you point out someone may be able to Jurassic Park it. One source says the Soviet Union did produce a few tons of it to put on an ICBM. (http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/publications/smallpox-fact-sheet).
But then that ICBM think makes me think twice. Producing tons of the stuff is nothing like producing a gram and the USSR might have had a reason for thinking it was best to deploy it in one big shot with an ICBM rather than have 100 KGB agents break open vials over 100 US cities. Plus we’ve had small pox for thousands of years and it didn’t drive humanity to extinction. Plus we actually have several tens of millions of pox vaccine stockpiled
I guess you’re right if you had a lot of group members willing to play volunteer you could do small clinical trials to perfect your engineered bioweapon. I think it would still be a lot. It would be like developing your own pharmaceutical from scratch, along with the clinical studies, data collection, proper analysis etc. Seems like a steep cliff to climb.
Again prove me wrong but I don’t think any real research ever went very far with engineered bioweapons, esp. ones based on viruses. And it’s not like the super powers weren’t willing to fund silly ideas during the cold war (see psychics, remote viewing etc.).
An idea you don’t consider for an eco-terrorist group; just kill the cows. A virus that kills cows could spread very fast given our factory farming and if you wiped out cow consumption for a while you’d shift diets away from the most land intense, greenhouse gas producing methods of feeding ourselves.
Yet here I think biological systems are anti-fragile, hence the reason it hasn’t happened. The moment you release your virus there’s billions of immune systems whose purpose is to neutralize it. Also your virus has no loyalty to you and will be happy to evolve away from killing its hosts. That applies if you’re a James Bond villain trying to kill all humanity or an eco-group killing all farm cows.
Consider, whey didn’t Hitler use smallpox? He wanted to ethnically cleanse eastern Europe. A virus to wipe out everyone there while vaccinated Aryan farmers move in would do the trick on paper. In reality, biology is probably more highly resistant to central planning than markets are.
Do you think we’ll start seeing more frequent global pandemic situations like this? Not talking about more pathogens, but rather improved ability to see those pathogens.
One of the biggest unknowns in the SARS2 pandemic is how many people get/got it. We only know what we look for, so it’s hard to know something is there if you’re not looking. Therefore testing is vital to understanding the progress of the pandemic.
The first tests we developed for SARS2 were based on real-time PCR. This is a technology that was new and exciting about fifteen years ago (when we got our own machine in our lab back in 2007 it was a big deal; of course we had lots of funding, and all the other labs would come use our machine and we’d bill them for it). It was almost entirely unknown twenty years ago.
Apply this to the present crisis. The reason real-time PCR is so valuable is because it has much higher sensitivity compared to conventional PCR (it’s quantitative, not just a band on a gel), and so can detect very small quantities of the target sequence. In other words, we have novel methods of detecting different strains and sub-strains of viruses circulating through the population. Those didn’t exist until very recently.
Again, we only see what we test for, so we can’t see what we don’t have the technology to test for. Fifty years ago we might have chalked this up to a particularly bad flu season, but wouldn’t be able to track cases like we can today. I keep hearing people call for expanded testing, but they don’t fully appreciate the amazing feat it is to produce a reasonably reliable test (not perfect, but at least good enough to be useful) in less than 3-5 years after the virus was first discovered.
If we only saw what we actually looked for, how often did pandemics less deadly than the Spanish flu but more deadly than the seasonal flu circulate through the population in, say, the 1900’s? 1800’s? Before? As our biological techniques improve, how likely is it that we’ll start seeing things that were happening but we couldn’t previously detect? Maybe COVID-19 is particularly bad, but it’s nothing like the 1918 pandemic. And we put a lot of measures in place to stop this pandemic before we knew how bad it actually was.
Will we do the same for future potential pandemics? One thing we know is that we’ll be able to see a lot more of them coming than we ever did before, including all the ones that ended up being too mild for us to notice without fancy new technology. The corollary here is with early detection of cancer. We know earlier detection is better for survival. Our ability to prevent the cancer from killing you is better if we detect it before it spreads. But we also know that early detection leads to treatment of otherwise-benign conditions. Will we do the same kind of chemotherapy to society at large because by their nature we can’t know how bad a pandemic could become unless we let it go unimpeded? How often do we apply early treatment?
That’s a fascinating point that I hadn’t considered. Thanks for bringing it up. I imagine that there will be a flood of retrospectives after this is over on what worked, what didn’t, whether we over-reacted, etc. One takeaway from what you said would hopefully be that be detecting things sooner we can establish a smaller, less permeable quarantine. As I said there will be a lot of finger pointing after the fact, but it sure seems like if China had done certain things before Chinese New Year rather than after that we’d be in a lot better shape, which may not have been possible, but it certainly wasn’t possible before the kind of testing we’re talking about.
Your point also bears on another thing I’ve been thinking about though haven’t posted much about because I don’t want to appear callous, but as you say, it’s hard to know how people would have dealt with this historically in the absence of the kind of data we have currently. In particular I’ve frequently thought that from a historical perspective people would have considered this the mildest plague ever. Something that completely ignores children? How great is that?
And following that point, can you imagine how much additional panic there would be if the demographics were reversed? If it killed ~10% of all kids who got it?
I also suspect the demographics have shifted in ways that make this more deadly than an identical pandemic would have been 150 years ago. When the 80+ population was less susceptible to metabolic syndrome, cardiac issues, etc., the identical pandemic would likely have been less deadly. There are other – obvious – demographic shifts at play here, and I suppose to the theme of the blog you could argue that a less healthy society is more fragile.
I’ve certainly considered that my industry is involved in making humanity as a whole inherently more fragile. The more we save everyone, the more we preserve the most fragile among us. That in turn makes it a bigger, more sudden blow when an event comes along that tests human fragility. As we’ve seen, if that event strains common resource pools, it may begin to affect even those who weren’t part of the pool of ‘saved fragile’ individuals, and can generate general problems.
This gives me a great premise for a speculative fiction story: extrapolate out halfway to where transhumanists want to go – people can live for 150+ years, and it’s getting longer all the time. To make room for people who rarely die, newer couples have fewer children, possibly below ‘replacement rate’, though that looks different when the people they would be replacing aren’t creating the space to be replaced. (I.e. replacement is far below 2.1)
As the old outnumber the young by large margins, social considerations shift subtly. Until one day a major trigger event kills people off at a rate of 5% for 50-year-olds, increasing by an additional 1% for every year of age above that. The elderly transhumanists are nearly wiped out, and humanity is left with a massive new demographic shift to deal with.
Unless, of course, that story has already been written. Have you read anything like that before?
Sounds like an interesting story, and I can’t immediately think of another story with that same premise.
As far as the premis, I’ve often had the same thoughts you did. Have you been around long enough to remember when I discussed the accumulation of negative mutations and germline editing?
https://wearenotsaved.com/2017/11/18/how-do-we-solve-the-problems-we-create/
A very similar idea that I came across in an Edge Question of the Year article.
Interesting. Clearly I’m not the first person to consider this issue. Let me be clear, though: I think it’s ethically the right thing to do – saving the lives of those who are the most vulnerable – even though we know it introduces problems for the gene pool as a whole later on down the road. We can tackle problems like that.
The opposite is not true, and I have a whole post outlining how the actual ideology of the Nazis (and many of their contemporaries) was exactly this kind of philosophy. Choosing to not treat some people because they’ll introduce problems in the gene pool is not only unethical, it’s downright backward. We’ll never solve problems we ignore because they’re inconvenient.
I think in an earlier age this would have been a strangely different type of virus. I’m wondering when ventilators were first discovered because it seems about 4-5% of people will need them (another 4-5% just need hospitalization).
I suspect in an earlier age this would have swept thru fast and killed a lot of people but the hospitals wouldn’t have been overwhelmed. Tying people up on ventilators for over a week is a huge deal with a lot of unknowns (you spend the whole time sedated, coming out of it you have a serious ‘mind lag’ that lasts quite a while, these long term effects are unknown). I wonder what the developing world will see where they have a younger population but increased density….. Meanwhile about 10 miles from me an anonymous tip about a body being kept in a shed revealed 17 bodies being kept at a nursing home who died from the virus. NJ they say will peak in about a week while NY might be coming down. I think the wave is traveling inwards now, though.
I’m not clear that you are increasing fragility, though. Are you looking at total humanity or percentages? I guess your thinking is if you have a population of a billion with 40% being old that is more fragile than a population of a billion with 10% being old. But what if you’re talking about a population of a billion with 40% being old versus a population of a half billion with 0% being old? Are you going for quantity or quality?
Logically the first is better. If a plague comes and wipes out every old person, you are left with 600M people versus 500M young people in the second population. Unless you make an argument that the old are some type of ‘useless eaters’ who are all a net negative to humanity, it seems like you’re making humanity less rather than more fragile by finding tests and cures.
So then if you are saying a population of a billion w/40% old is more fragile than a billion w/0% old, how do you start with a billion young people and don’t end up with a billion old people in 30-40 years? Well you could have a ‘high metabolism’ society where people have kids early then die quickly in late middle age. Is that society less fragile? I’m not sure it is.
As to the point about this being a ‘mild’ plague:
Obviously it’s not mild to grandma and all the other people who die of it. Everyone acknowledges this. It’s also true that even as late as Valentine’s day we didn’t know a lot about whether this would become a deadly global pandemic capable of killing people in numbers like SARS or – worse – MERS. And that will hold for future pandemics as well.
It’s very much Black Swan reasoning that if you see a potential pandemic arise that has a 1% probability of wiping out 25% of humanity you should respond to the potential pandemic aggressively. Most of the time your efforts will be overblown, but on rare occasions you’ll save billions of lives. And the important insight is to understand that you CAN’T KNOW IN ADVANCE of the decision which scenario you’re facing. The retrospectives know, but what they often forget is how much of their knowledge was still uncertain at the time they look back to.
For what it’s worth, why Covid almost certainly wasn’t a bioweapon:
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicated-origins.html
Long story short the the ‘spike’ on the virus that attaches to ACE2 receptors is very good. Computer AI’s that try to design a spike that connects to ACE2 end up zeroing in on designs that are good but nowhere near as good as the virus. Nature finds better designs than humans.
This seems to be consistent with genetic engineering to date. Most of it has been about repairing a specific known gene or inserting a gene, and then the gene that’s inserted comes from some other species rather than one ‘designed’ from the bottom up.
Makes one wonder if genetically engineered weapons are a thing, where are they? One would think there’d be some market in a ‘weapon’ that has a non-military use such as to target a weed or pest.
Not saying this could never be a problem but it seems like it is still one that’s likely to be a future rather than present problem (like the robot revolt and the sentient AI).
De novo protein design is still really hard and takes massive computing power (cf. the Folding@Home project). There has been some fascinating research on designer enzymes, which is usually a process of taking enzymes that do something similar to what we want, but then we tweak it to do a very specific something else. At this point, even that kind of modification is difficult without a massive multi-year university-funded project that requires a lot of infrastructure and expertise.
Since that’s the way to truly ‘engineer’ a bioweapon, the high barrier to entry is probably why it hasn’t been done. An easier way to create something awful would be to mix and match genes from multiple deadly viruses to try and make them more nasty. That’s a much lower barrier, but I can see why it hasn’t happened yet.
Meanwhile, pretty much all of chemistry is done better and in a more complicated way by biological enzymes. That’s why biological compounds are much more complex than engineered ones. If we can figure out how to make protein folding prediction something the average person can do on a desktop computer the world is our oyster. We’d be able to do amazing things with chemistry, to the point where people would look back to our capabilities today in the same way we look back at the capabilities of physicists pre-Newton.
We’d also lower the barrier to bioterrorism dramatically. Unfortunately/fortunately, that day is coming and we need to find a way to deal with it.
hmmm any resources you’d recommend for someone to understand this all better from a layman’s POV?
I think at this point I’m not hearing any convincing argument for bioweapon.