Thanks yeah I agree with your first question being important, and I would say we have predicted Zero new problematic pathogens ever. I agree with you that the numerator could be pandemics from new zoonotic pathogens which were predicted in advance, and that number I think is zero, making it hard to calculate a prior with this....
You make a decent argument that we could look at pandemics from organisms which we already know have pandemic potential in humans and then see how many of those we got correct. I don’t know the answer to this, but I would imagine its a VERY LOW number (or even zero) again.
My feeling is that there are so many animal diseases out there, the scenarios where diseases combine or mutate to form variants that are dangerous to humans is so hard to predict and random, that even the majority that appear “super close” to being dangerous will never actually become dangerous.
Predicting pandemics is not like predicting volcanic eruptions—at least not yet and you are right that sequencing and other technology will gradually make us better at this—I just think we aren’t nearly there yet.
”If one wanted to make a serious effort to forecast this, one can imagine a Monte Carlo model...” This is basically what the institute for progress did, but in a more simple linear way have you had a look at their calculations?
My feeling is that there are so many animal diseases out there, the scenarios where diseases combine or mutate to form variants that are dangerous to humans is so hard to predict and random, that even the majority that appear “super close” to being dangerous will never actually become dangerous.
I suppose one could create a dataset of various viruses with columns like: Is it endemic in domesticated mammals? How many humans have been infected? Does it appear to be evolving? Can it reassort with human influenza? Etc. etc. and then train a regression or something to predict a pandemic. I suppose data would be extremely sparse, but if you rework the task as “predicting whether a virus will hop from species A to species B” there might be more data, since there are lots of species pairs.
“If one wanted to make a serious effort to forecast this, one can imagine a Monte Carlo model...” This is basically what the institute for progress did, but in a more simple linear way have you had a look at their calculations?
Thanks yeah I agree with your first question being important, and I would say we have predicted Zero new problematic pathogens ever. I agree with you that the numerator could be pandemics from new zoonotic pathogens which were predicted in advance, and that number I think is zero, making it hard to calculate a prior with this....
You make a decent argument that we could look at pandemics from organisms which we already know have pandemic potential in humans and then see how many of those we got correct. I don’t know the answer to this, but I would imagine its a VERY LOW number (or even zero) again.
My feeling is that there are so many animal diseases out there, the scenarios where diseases combine or mutate to form variants that are dangerous to humans is so hard to predict and random, that even the majority that appear “super close” to being dangerous will never actually become dangerous.
Predicting pandemics is not like predicting volcanic eruptions—at least not yet and you are right that sequencing and other technology will gradually make us better at this—I just think we aren’t nearly there yet.
”If one wanted to make a serious effort to forecast this, one can imagine a Monte Carlo model...” This is basically what the institute for progress did, but in a more simple linear way have you had a look at their calculations?
Cheers.
Thanks for the reply.
I suppose one could create a dataset of various viruses with columns like: Is it endemic in domesticated mammals? How many humans have been infected? Does it appear to be evolving? Can it reassort with human influenza? Etc. etc. and then train a regression or something to predict a pandemic. I suppose data would be extremely sparse, but if you rework the task as “predicting whether a virus will hop from species A to species B” there might be more data, since there are lots of species pairs.
I haven’t looked, could you provide a link?
I put it in my last reply ;)
https://ifp.org/what-are-the-chances-an-h5n1-pandemic-is-worse-than-covid/
Oh sorry I guess I missed it. I’ll reply to that comment.