2020-03-22
COVID-19, The West, and Complexity: On terrible leaders and a Playlist
I remember a meeting in the 00s with Portuguese science minister (and physicist) Mariano Gago (made possible by the tireless João Sentieiro) in his office. I was pitching a doctoral program and collaboration center in computational biology with a focus on complex networks and systems. I told him that in the XXI century much more training & funding for epidemic modelling, and multi-level bio/social/technical network complexity was necessary. He was not happy at all when I said that funding for these problems would be much more more useful to society than funding particle accelerators at CERN. When we got some funding for the idea (from his funding agency and others but much less than CERN :), the first person I brought in was Alessandro Vespignani who was so nice to agree to help the program. He ended up collaborating with Gabriela Gomes and others during his visit to get funding for Epiwork and InfluenzaNet. I wish Gago and all science funding agencies had taken this area more seriously. We need a CERN and an NSF-STC for pandemics and complex multilevel networks and systems.
In the meantime, we have to witness the late and sad response of EU and USA leaders to this pandemic. No government in the West comes out looking good from this pandemic. With all the lead time they had since the outbreak, they cannot match the type of response we have seen from China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Leaders in the west still do not understand network, multilevel complexity where viruses travel in technological networks to impact our health, society and economy. The idea that they were not able to track and test travel flows out of Wuhan on transportation networks, rather than direct flights, demonstrates governments still do not understand network complexity---or don't care to.
There has certainly been loss in leadership from Obama to Trump; Obama, after all, lead the effort to contain the Ebola outbreak. For sure this does not look good for the USA. But what to say of European leaders? They cannot muster leadership if the US Emperor is a #TerriblePresident? It is even more pathetic that European leaders, who are not as terrible as Trump and know he is useless, cannot take a leadership role in this instance. I hope this is the ultimate wake-up call for the West, rather than our end--- previous civilizations have fallen from the impact of disease.
Oh, well. In the meantime, let's follow our social containment before we can regroup. Towards that, here is a #StayHome playlist for a hopeful quarantine. I am still hopeful that the younger generations will learn from this and do better than current western leaders have.
In the meantime, we have to witness the late and sad response of EU and USA leaders to this pandemic. No government in the West comes out looking good from this pandemic. With all the lead time they had since the outbreak, they cannot match the type of response we have seen from China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Leaders in the west still do not understand network, multilevel complexity where viruses travel in technological networks to impact our health, society and economy. The idea that they were not able to track and test travel flows out of Wuhan on transportation networks, rather than direct flights, demonstrates governments still do not understand network complexity---or don't care to.
There has certainly been loss in leadership from Obama to Trump; Obama, after all, lead the effort to contain the Ebola outbreak. For sure this does not look good for the USA. But what to say of European leaders? They cannot muster leadership if the US Emperor is a #TerriblePresident? It is even more pathetic that European leaders, who are not as terrible as Trump and know he is useless, cannot take a leadership role in this instance. I hope this is the ultimate wake-up call for the West, rather than our end--- previous civilizations have fallen from the impact of disease.
Oh, well. In the meantime, let's follow our social containment before we can regroup. Towards that, here is a #StayHome playlist for a hopeful quarantine. I am still hopeful that the younger generations will learn from this and do better than current western leaders have.
Labels: #ComplexNetworks, #ComplexSystems, #Covid19, #Music, #Pandemics, #TerriblePresident
