3.3 The risk of cascading failures

Scientists are racing to understand how rapidly Coronavirus can spread. Key metric is the basic reproduction number (R0)- Expected number of infected cases directly generated by one case of infection. If the reproduction number goes below one, it means that the epidemic can be expected to die out so...

If we assume that 400 people have been infected but undetected, the number of infected by the end of the week would reach 3,600. if the same process continues for another week, we are already at 32,400 by week two of our thought experiment. By week three, we reach 291,600 and by week four we reach 2...

Industrial civilization is moving into the final stages of its life cycle. This stage creates wide new spaces for societal and civilizational renewal. The Coronavirus outbreak is, ultimately, a lesson in not just the inherent systemic Fragilities in industrial civilization, but also the limits of...

Compared to previous major disease outbreaks like Sars and Mers, the Coronavirus has a much lower mortality rate. The best available data suggests that the death rate appears to be less than 3 percent, but there are questions about its reliability. For patients over 80 years old, the mortality rate ...

Public health experts say the Coronavirus expansion could play out in four ways. 

Scenario 1: the outbreak could be controlled via public-health interventions and disappear. 

Scenario 2: a vaccine could be developed but it won’t come in time to contain the global spread. Sce...

The most devastating impact of the coronavirus might well be not from the virus but from the way human systems respond to it.

The 2008 financial crash was triggered by a global shift to more expensive sources of fossil fuel energy, due to the depletion of cheaper conventional resources. This shift was compensated for by massive quantitative easing (Qe), essentially, the expansion of global debt. This Debt-Expansion has ...

Human capacity to give freely regardless of material constraints. This is the capacity through love to work, give and share not for monetary gain, not for self-protection, not for any reason other than the intrinsic beauty of the act itself. As the Coronavirus crisis kicks off, it is our capacity...

The Coronavirus is not Vector-Borne, but Zoonotic — passed from animals to humans. There's no specific link between climate change and the Coronavirus. But there can be little doubt that climate change has increased the risk identified here. China’s particular vulnerability is related to rapid in...