[Note by me: The International Health Regulations include multiple instances of “public health emergency of international concern”. By contrast, they include only one instance of “pandemic”, and this is in the term “pandemic influenza” in a formal statement by China rather than the main text of the regulation.]
The WHO declared a PHEIC due to COVID-19 on January 30th.
The OP was prompted by a claim that the timing of the WHO using the term “pandemic” provides an argument against epistemic modesty. (Though I appreciate this was less clear in the OP than it could have been, and maybe it was a bad idea to copy my Facebook comment here anyway.) From the Facebook comment I was responding to:
For example, to me, the WHO taking until ~March 12 to call this a pandemic*, when the informed amateurs I listen to were all pretty convinced that this will be pretty bad since at least early March, is at least some evidence that trusting informed amateurs has some value over entirely trusting people usually perceived as experts.
Since the WHO declaring a PHEIC seems much more consequential than them using the term “pandemic”, the timing of the PHEIC declaration seems more relevant for assessing the merits of the WHO response, and thus for any argument regarding epistemic modesty.
Since the PHEIC declaration happened significantly earlier, any argument based on the premise that it happened too late is significantly weaker. And whatever the apparent initial force of this weaker argument, my undermining response from the OP still applies.
So overall, while the OP’s premise appealing to major legal/institutional consequences of the WHO using the term “pandemic” seems false, I’m now even more convinced of the key claim I wanted to argue for: that the WHO response does not provide an argument against epistemic modesty in general, nor for the epistemic superiority of “informed amateurs” over experts on COVID-19.
About declaring it a “pandemic,” I’ve seen the WHO reason as follows (me paraphrasing):
«Once we call it a pandemic, some countries might throw up their hands and say “we’re screwed,” so we should better wait before calling it that, and instead emphasize that countries need to try harder at containment for as long as there’s still a small chance that it might work.»
So overall, while the OP’s premise appealing to major legal/institutional consequences of the WHO using the term “pandemic” seems false, I’m now even more convinced of the key claim I wanted to argue for: that the WHO response does not provide an argument against epistemic modesty in general, nor for the epistemic superiority of “informed amateurs” over experts on COVID-19.
Yeah, I think that’s a good point.
I’m not sure I can have updates in favor or against modest epistemology because it seems to me that my true rejection is mostly “my brain can’t do that.” But if I could have further updates against modest epistemology, the main Covid-19-related example for me would be how long it took some countries to realize that flattening the curve instead of squishing it is going to lead to a lot more deaths and tragedy than people seem to have initially thought. I realize that it’s hard to distinguish between what’s actual government opinion versus what’s bad journalism, but I’m pretty confident there was a time when informed amateurs could see that experts were operating under some probably false or at least dubious assumptions. (I’m happy to elaborate if anyone’s interested.)
For example, to me, the WHO taking until ~March 12 to call this a pandemic*, when the informed amateurs I listen to were all pretty convinced that this will be pretty bad since at least early March, is at least some evidence that trusting informed amateurs has some value over entirely trusting people usually perceived as experts.
Also, predicting that something will be pretty bad or will be a pandemic is not the same as saying it is now a pandemic. When did it become a pandemic according to the WHO’s definition?
Dr Fukuda: An easy way to think about pandemic – and actually a way I have some times described in the past – is to say: a pandemic is a global outbreak. Then you might ask yourself: “What is a global outbreak”? Global outbreak means that we see both spread of the agent – and in this case we see this new A(H1N1) virus to most parts of the world – and then we see disease activities in addition to the spread of the virus. Right now, it would be fair to say that we have an evolving situation in which a new influenza virus is clearly spreading, but it has not reached all parts of the world and it has not established community activity in all parts of the world. It is quite possible that it will continue to spread and it will establish itself in many other countries and multiple regions, at which time it will be fair to call it a pandemic at that point. But right now, we are really in the early part of the evolution of the spread of this virus and we will see where it goes.
[Epistemic status: info from the WHO website and Wikipedia, but I overall invested only ~10 min, so might be missing something.]
It seems my remarks do apply for “public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)” instead of “pandemic”. For example, from Wikipedia:
The WHO declared a PHEIC due to COVID-19 on January 30th.
The OP was prompted by a claim that the timing of the WHO using the term “pandemic” provides an argument against epistemic modesty. (Though I appreciate this was less clear in the OP than it could have been, and maybe it was a bad idea to copy my Facebook comment here anyway.) From the Facebook comment I was responding to:
Since the WHO declaring a PHEIC seems much more consequential than them using the term “pandemic”, the timing of the PHEIC declaration seems more relevant for assessing the merits of the WHO response, and thus for any argument regarding epistemic modesty.
Since the PHEIC declaration happened significantly earlier, any argument based on the premise that it happened too late is significantly weaker. And whatever the apparent initial force of this weaker argument, my undermining response from the OP still applies.
So overall, while the OP’s premise appealing to major legal/institutional consequences of the WHO using the term “pandemic” seems false, I’m now even more convinced of the key claim I wanted to argue for: that the WHO response does not provide an argument against epistemic modesty in general, nor for the epistemic superiority of “informed amateurs” over experts on COVID-19.
About declaring it a “pandemic,” I’ve seen the WHO reason as follows (me paraphrasing):
«Once we call it a pandemic, some countries might throw up their hands and say “we’re screwed,” so we should better wait before calling it that, and instead emphasize that countries need to try harder at containment for as long as there’s still a small chance that it might work.»
Yeah, I think that’s a good point.
I’m not sure I can have updates in favor or against modest epistemology because it seems to me that my true rejection is mostly “my brain can’t do that.” But if I could have further updates against modest epistemology, the main Covid-19-related example for me would be how long it took some countries to realize that flattening the curve instead of squishing it is going to lead to a lot more deaths and tragedy than people seem to have initially thought. I realize that it’s hard to distinguish between what’s actual government opinion versus what’s bad journalism, but I’m pretty confident there was a time when informed amateurs could see that experts were operating under some probably false or at least dubious assumptions. (I’m happy to elaborate if anyone’s interested.)
Also, predicting that something will be pretty bad or will be a pandemic is not the same as saying it is now a pandemic. When did it become a pandemic according to the WHO’s definition?
Expanding a quote I found on the wiki page in the transcript here from 2009:
But see also WHO says it no longer uses ‘pandemic’ category, but virus still emergency from February 24, 2020.