Covid-19 pandemic: the curse of the black swan

In her brilliant article Don’t blame the black swan for this pandemic (May 17), Sue de Groot argues that Covid-19 is not a black swan phenomenon because Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the celebrated author who popularised this concept through his seminal book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, says it’s not.

To reinforce her argument further, she cites examples of how pandemics have been a factor in human history, and notes that personalities such as Bill Gates have long been warning us about the likely occurrence of a Covid-like disease.

I agree with De Groot that pathogens are a natural phenomenon. They have been with us throughout our history. They can wreak havoc, exterminate populations and even collapse an entire civilisation.

But I differ with her on three counts.

First, it’s not uncommon for the inventor of a popular idea to argue against his own invention.

History is replete with examples of people who warn us about an impending event but are dismissed as alarmists or conspiracy theorists

An example is Thomas Kuhn, the author of another path-breaking work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, who, later in his career, contested the general interpretation of “paradigms”, a concept that had been popularised by his own book (which was first published in 1962).

Moreover, history is replete with examples of people who warn us about an impending event but are dismissed as alarmists or conspiracy theorists. The Gates example falls in this category.

Second, the black swan effect of Covid-19 is not in its actual occurrence but in our surprise at encountering a flu-like virus that we didn’t know about, and in the fact that our advances in medical and epidemiological science, as well as the public health safeguards in place for such infections, were caught unprepared.

Since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and thanks among other things to the advent of the World Heath Organisation in the 1940s, we have until now been able to more or less cope with the various strains of flu virus in our midst. We have flu vaccines and can buy suitable medication over the counter. But none of our existing medications and treatments is a best response to Covid-19.

They make us miss things that are right under our nose, until something like Covid-19 shakes us to undergo a transformation

Some countries suffer heavy casualties every winter due to flu. Outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome are common in some regions. These flu viruses are indeed deadly and do destabilise affected communities when they occur. But none can claim to match Covid-19 in impact and scale.

Third, we tend to use the black swan and its cousin, “the butterfly effect”, to illustrate chaos theory. But we can also find the concept in the philosophy of knowledge — in how we confirm or falsify a scientific hypothesis.

The more we see white swans wherever we go, the stronger our belief in the probability, or even certainty, that all swans are white. The discovery of a black swan not only falsifies the white swan hypothesis, but demolishes it as an accepted fact, no matter how many hundreds of white swans there might be. This is the phenomenon of “scientific revolutions” described by Kuhn.

We make hypotheses all the time, sometimes subconsciously. Some of these are about a probable future we infer from the past and present. Our hypotheses are the assumptions we develop to organise the physical world to make it understandable to us. Helpful as they are as our lenses, they are also our epistemic blind spots. They make us miss things that are right under our nose until, one day, something like Covid-19 shakes us to experience a revelation and undergo a transformation.

Covid-19 is a black swan moment for public policy. Many governments had implicitly assumed in their national plans and “visions” that diseases were now under control. If anything, it was the likes of climate change that were considered the biggest headaches. Now this is set to change, because Covid-19 has falsified this implicit assumption. Henceforth, we should expect that, within governments, more policy focus and fiscal resource allocation will be directed towards infectious diseases.

Within the African Union, our core assumptions revolve around the “renaissance triad” — peace and security, economic development, and the good governance cluster of issues. To this triad we should now add a fourth factor — that is, preparing to cope with national disasters.

For example, this pandemic has shown us that, as a best practice, countries should have national legislation for disaster management, as well as supporting institutions (such as a centre for disease control) and the necessary contingency fund. Post this pandemic we expect to see more countries adopting this best practice.

In the private sector, thanks to technology, it’s now easier to predict the behaviour of a consumer. Thanks to data analysis, GPS technology and our Google searches can be used to predict my likely reaction to a product on sale. The science of statistics has also evolved and developed a mathematical technique for handling some stochastic phenomena.

But it will not be so easy for society. Covid-19 has exposed the fallibility of available forecasting tools like futures studies, scenario planning and national plans. It’s now back to the drawing board for those with the courage to revisit and overhaul their basic assumptions about our probable future.

The chase to catch up with the future is on. A swan of a different colour could be out there waiting to be discovered.

• Maloka is CEO of the African Peer Review Mechanism. He writes in his personal capacity