- [ETA: this point is likely wrong, cf. Khorton’s comment below. However, I believe the conclusion that the timing of WHO declarations by itself doesn’t provide a significant argument against epistemic modesty still stands, as I explain in a follow-up comment below.] The WHO declaring a pandemic has a bunch of major legal and institutional consequences. E.g. my guess is that among other things it affects the amounts of resources the WHO and other actors can utilize, the kind of work the WHO and others are allowed to do, and the kind of recommendations the WHO can make.
- The optimal time for the WHO to declare a pandemic is primarily determined by these legal and institutional consequences. Whether COVID-19 is or will in fact be a pandemic in the everyday or epidemiological sense is an important input into the decision, but not a decisive one.
- Without familiarity with the WHO and the legal and institutional system it is a part of, it is very difficult to accurately assess the consequences of the WHO declaring a pandemic. Therefore, it is very hard to evaluate the timing of the WHO’s declaration without such familiarity. And being even maximally well-informed about COVID-19 itself isn’t even remotely sufficient for an accurate evaluation.
- The bottom line is that the WHO officially declaring that COVID-19 is a pandemic is a totally different thing from any individual persuasively arguing that COVID-19 is or will be a pandemic. In a language that would accurately reflect differences in meaning, me saying that COVID-19 is a pandemic and the WHO declaring COVID-19 is a pandemic would be done using different words. It is simply not the primary purpose of this WHO speech act to be an early, accurate, reliable, or whatever indicator of whether “COVID-19 is a pandemic”, to predict its impact, or any other similar thing. It isn’t primarily epistemic in any sense.
- If just based on information about COVID-19 itself someone confidently thinks that the WHO ought to have declared a pandemic earlier, they are making a mistake akin to the mistake reflected by answering “yes” to the question “could you pass me the salt?” without doing anything.
So did the WHO make a mistake by not declaring COVID-19 to be a pandemic earlier, and if so how consequential was it? Well, I think the timing was probably suboptimal just because my prior is that most complex institutions aren’t optimized for getting the timing of such things exactly right. But I have no idea how consequential a potential mistake was. In fact, I’m about 50-50 on whether the optimal time would have been slightly earlier or slightly later. (Though substantially earlier seems significantly more likely optimal than substantially later.)
“The WHO declaring a pandemic has a bunch of major legal and institutional consequences. E.g. my guess is that among other things it affects the amounts of resources the WHO and other actors can utilize, the kind of work the WHO and others are allowed to do, and the kind of recommendations the WHO can make.”
Are you sure about this? I’ve read that there aren’t major implications to it being officially declared a pandemic.
[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.
Thank you for pointing this out! It sounds like my guess was probably just wrong.
My guess was based on a crude prior on international organizations, not anything I know about the WHO specifically. I clarified the epistemic status in the OP.
[Epistemic status: speculation based on priors about international organizations. I know next to nothing about the WHO specifically.]
[On the WHO declaring COVID-19 a pandemic only (?) on March 12th. Prompted by this Facebook discussion on epistemic modesty on COVID-19.]
- [ETA: this point is likely wrong, cf. Khorton’s comment below. However, I believe the conclusion that the timing of WHO declarations by itself doesn’t provide a significant argument against epistemic modesty still stands, as I explain in a follow-up comment below.] The WHO declaring a pandemic has a bunch of major legal and institutional consequences. E.g. my guess is that among other things it affects the amounts of resources the WHO and other actors can utilize, the kind of work the WHO and others are allowed to do, and the kind of recommendations the WHO can make.
- The optimal time for the WHO to declare a pandemic is primarily determined by these legal and institutional consequences. Whether COVID-19 is or will in fact be a pandemic in the everyday or epidemiological sense is an important input into the decision, but not a decisive one.
- Without familiarity with the WHO and the legal and institutional system it is a part of, it is very difficult to accurately assess the consequences of the WHO declaring a pandemic. Therefore, it is very hard to evaluate the timing of the WHO’s declaration without such familiarity. And being even maximally well-informed about COVID-19 itself isn’t even remotely sufficient for an accurate evaluation.
- The bottom line is that the WHO officially declaring that COVID-19 is a pandemic is a totally different thing from any individual persuasively arguing that COVID-19 is or will be a pandemic. In a language that would accurately reflect differences in meaning, me saying that COVID-19 is a pandemic and the WHO declaring COVID-19 is a pandemic would be done using different words. It is simply not the primary purpose of this WHO speech act to be an early, accurate, reliable, or whatever indicator of whether “COVID-19 is a pandemic”, to predict its impact, or any other similar thing. It isn’t primarily epistemic in any sense.
- If just based on information about COVID-19 itself someone confidently thinks that the WHO ought to have declared a pandemic earlier, they are making a mistake akin to the mistake reflected by answering “yes” to the question “could you pass me the salt?” without doing anything.
So did the WHO make a mistake by not declaring COVID-19 to be a pandemic earlier, and if so how consequential was it? Well, I think the timing was probably suboptimal just because my prior is that most complex institutions aren’t optimized for getting the timing of such things exactly right. But I have no idea how consequential a potential mistake was. In fact, I’m about 50-50 on whether the optimal time would have been slightly earlier or slightly later. (Though substantially earlier seems significantly more likely optimal than substantially later.)
“The WHO declaring a pandemic has a bunch of major legal and institutional consequences. E.g. my guess is that among other things it affects the amounts of resources the WHO and other actors can utilize, the kind of work the WHO and others are allowed to do, and the kind of recommendations the WHO can make.”
Are you sure about this? I’ve read that there aren’t major implications to it being officially declared a pandemic.
This article suggests there aren’t major changes based on ‘pandemic’ status https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51839944
[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.
Thank you for pointing this out! It sounds like my guess was probably just wrong.
My guess was based on a crude prior on international organizations, not anything I know about the WHO specifically. I clarified the epistemic status in the OP.