Otto Kainulainen NT Safety Symposium

1. COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
“The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus.”
Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg (B1925-D2008)
What does SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) stand for?
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
The opening session of the Global Solutions Summit 2020 poignantly stated:
Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates to us the value of freedom - the freedom to move, to be with those we love,
to live in dignity and security - for ourselves and for those around us, from our loved ones to the refugees and
the downtrodden. Above all, it shows us the importance of recognising the true purpose of all our
businesses and economies, our political parties and governments, our local civic associations and our
international organisations, our conventions and ideologies, and all our other systems: namely, to serve
human needs and purposes.

2. COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
Why were the vast majority of organisations and businesses so poorly prepared for the
potential of a global pandemic and all its impacts.
I will use The Black Swan written by professor Nassim Taleb as the counterpoint or
measuring stick to try and understand why so many thought this could not happen to them or
their organisation.
Note that many commentators and organisational leaders have concluded that COVID is a
‘Black Swan Event’ or at least unprecedented – How could we have possibly planned for
this!
Black Swan Events
When you make an event seem exceptional or unprecedented when it really isn’t, it
will be used as a crutch by those who failed to prepare in the face of the known risk.
High-Consequence, Low-Probability Events

3. COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
‘What is a Black Swan Event’
To be defined as a ‘Black Swan Event’, Nassim Taleb came up with three
attributes that need to be met:
Attribute one: Is the event an outlier? The Event lies outside the realm of
regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to
its possibility.
Have we never seen a Pandemic before with similarities to COVID or heard
of it happening?

4. COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
‘What is a Black Swan Event’
Attribute two: Does the event carry an extreme impact? The event must have a major
impact somehow positive or negative.
While COVID-19 is not anticipated to have an impact even remotely close to that of the 1918
flu outbreak (at least 50 million deaths), there should be no question that the current pandemic
has had - and will continue to have - an extreme impact, both on people and on national
economies.
But does that make it a Black Swan Event?

5. COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
‘What is a Black Swan Event’
Attribute three: Is it, or will it be, normalized after the fact?
The concept of “normalising” a large event - by rendering it explainable or predictable in
hindsight.
In spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its
occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.“
• Taleb has weighed in on the question of whether COVID-19 is or isn’t a Black Swan.
Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

6. COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
What are some examples of Black Swan events?
• The personal computer, Mobile phone/Smart Phone?
• The rise of the Internet, Social Media, Google
• The Sinking Of The Titanic
• The Great Depression
• World War I,
• The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall Crumbling
• September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. World Trade Centre and the aftermath - 20 years of
ongoing war in the Middle East
• Financial Crisis's: 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. 2000 Dot Com Crash. 2008 GFC
• Fukushima Nuclear Reactor V Earthquake and Tsunami

7. So knowing that that COVID was not a Black Swan Event, and having been warned by many
who knew and understood the potential – why didn’t we plan or prepare for such an event.
Where did the inertia come from?
• We have an innate human tendency to focus on immediate threats rather than risks that
seem far in the future.
• Imminent low-level threats seem more important to us than high-level events, which we find
hard to imagine. Cant possibly happen to us!
• Seeing the once-in-a-century likelihood as meaning this event will occur many years into
the future and can therefore essentially be disregarded.
COVID: Why weren’t we prepared

8. David Ropeik Management and Risk Guru, says it well,
“We’re counting on a risk perception system to save us that's better designed to protect us
from snakes and the dark than global abstractions laced with technological complexity and
unknowns.”
This results in what Ropeik calls an ‘optimism bias’ – Our human instinct is to be “overly
optimistic about what lies down the road, when the details are hazy.”
COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
Imminent low-level threats seem more important to us than high-level events, which we find
hard to imagine. Our human tendency is to assume such things are unlikely to happen to us.
This instinct also results in organisations, and governments, failing to take high-consequence,
low-probability events as seriously as they should, with the resulting failure to plan effectively
for them.

9. Warnings about the “next” outbreak included:
• simulations run all over the world by respective governments and their health agencies.
• In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers and op-
eds warning of the possibility of a Pandemic.
• Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of
his TED Talk.
• Both George W. Bush (in November 2005) and Barack Obama (in December 2014)
warned of the next pandemic in speeches at the US National Institute of Health.
• Seven days before Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2017, his aides and out-going
Obama administration officials were briefed on a table-top exercise that played through
a fictitious outbreak of H9N2 - an Avian Influenza Virus - with effects not unlike what we
have seen with SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).
COVID: Why weren’t we prepared

10. Why is it challenging to prepare for High-consequence, low-probability events?
Something with extreme impact, but unlikely to happen in any given year.
There is a tendency for people and organisations to focus on:
• probability rather than consequence,
Mistakenly seeing the once-in-a-century likelihood as meaning this event will occur many
years into the future and can therefore essentially be disregarded.
COVID: Why weren’t we prepared

11. Maybe we were blinded to the real threat of a true international crisis because we saw so many
“This Is The Big One” threats end up flaming out, as one after another outbreak remained
confined to regions of the world that felt remote and different from most of us.
With the exception of AIDS, raging epidemics have tended NOT to go global:
• SARS in 2003 pretty much stayed in Asia,
• MERS in 2012 didn’t really leave the Middle East,
• Ebola in 2014 was mostly an African scourge.
• Don’t forget HENDRA virus developed in QLD
The rest of the world, we kept watching ourselves dodge a bullet, and it was easy to attribute
everyone else’s susceptibility to things that didn’t exist in our comfy Western way of life.
Most of us didn’t ride camels, didn’t eat monkeys, didn’t handle live bats and civet cats in the
marketplace. None of that in the end MATTERED
ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG Author Of A Dancing Matrix
COVID: Why weren’t we prepared

12. COVID: Why weren’t we prepared
Looking Forward
What other high-consequence, low-likelihood events should we prepare for?
Are there other high-consequence, low-likelihood events that society is currently effectively ignoring?
The potential list is long and can be man made or initiated or natural phenomena.
Some examples, all of which are predictable and some of which are inevitable (the only question being of
‘when’, not ‘if’. How many of these has your organisation considered and how many do you have plans for?
 Another influenza or viral pandemic
 A highly successful cyber-attack on critical infrastructure, such as utilities or one of the major cloud-
computing providers or NBN failure
 A Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) attack on a highly populated central business
district
 A nuclear winter type incident caused by a super volcano eruption.
 Tsunami, Earthquake, Cyclone, Major Flooding ………………………………………..>

13. There is another category of high-consequence event.
Those that are not low-likelihood events that we can see are already
underway, but are slow developers - more ‘boiling frog’ than a Black Swan.
Examples:
• Ultra Nationalism – extremes of political spectrum, politics of fear
• Antibiotic resistance – over prescription
• Destruction of forests and eco systems – think Brazil, Indonesia, Borneo
• Climate change - Global
COVID: Why weren’t we prepared

14. THANK YOU
Collaboration and Transparency in the sciences, planning
and action should be fundamental across governments,
agencies and corporations to address threats
COVID: Why weren’t we prepared