# Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 1 with Vinay Gupta (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [681], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2020-03-20 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Vinay explains which SCIM tiers matter when, with municipal planning as the target scale.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - FluSCIM (2010): Another author's application of the SCIM framework to pandemic flu.
  - Six ways people die (2008): Framework: people die of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, illness or injury, so infrastructure has to answer... (suggested by machine)
  - The Living City (2009): A Buttered Side Down talk to the engineering firm Arup, with Mike Bennett: how cities learned to beat... (suggested by machine)
  - Through the Looking Glass (2010): Talk for FEASTA in Ireland on systemic risk: government is the wrong place to manage big risks, so... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: flu / infection / risk (81%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: coronavirus (11 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); basic income (6 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); shared map (3 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 4 undated); effective organizations (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 2 undated); shared plan (2 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 4 undated); pandemic flu (4 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); expertise (6 here; 65 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); critical infrastructure (4 here; 54 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 7 undated); masks (2 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); citizens (4 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.52 (1.00 is the top), number 72 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [689] [Vinay Gupta - Resilience Guru | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/689.md): same career work: FluSCIM
  - [303] [How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md): same career work: FluSCIM
- On the same works, just before: [760] [Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md); [771] [Vinay Gupta talks about Myths and Fears (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/771.md); [685] [Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/685.md)
- On the same works, just after: [249] A long, difficult conversation about dealing with... (2020); [206] [Vinay Gupta's Big Idea: An Identity Layer for Your Things (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/206.md); [770] [Grounded Gabbin' with Vinay Gupta (on the meta-crisis) (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/770.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 1 with Vinay Gupta, video, 2020-03-20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [681], https://guptaoption.com/texts/681.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=2400s) right you see pictures you know Wuhan in the middle of this thing everybody is going around an improvised moon suits right plastic yeah duct tape you know they've got five liter bottles like you'd get for what water ten liter bottles they've sold the bottom off these things and they're wearing them as improvised helmets right and when I saw that like okay so an ordinary civilian population was under sufficient stress as fish and threat that they figured out how to make really fairly industrial personal protective equipment from whatever it was they helped of lying around by oh boy we have a problem yeah that's that's what this is so scary to me - because you're mentioning even some potential issues in your own building I mean I'm it actually inspired me to talk to my own apartment building about it I haven't done it yet but I'm coming up with a little worksheet for it because you know people are more I don't want to say independent but that's the only word I can think of right now and it seems like it's going to be difficult for that to happen here yeah I mean it's it's tricky but on the other hand Americans are tough right you know the they're used to working together you know to handle crisis everything from barn raisings through to you know invasions they're pretty good once they take the problem seriously but working together to solve the problem you know there is a phase where everybody is a bit like you know ruthless and dependence but right under the surface there is a very strong communitarian streak in American culture you know thinking that it gives me gives acting people hope and optimism - which I appreciate well your wagons were wagon trains for a reason right you know nobody went out in a wagon on their own because you were just gonna get eaten alive that was not gonna work you can't to go with a group because that was how you got the stability to get the job done and I mean the thing is a lot of people will run around in crises Jowell community is the answer communities out so community is not the answer community is the next horizon right your work on your own stuff you get your game together you deal with your own problems then you help your neighbors not cause you problems by getting sick and then getting music right anybody that's got a problem in your neighborhood right that problem is kind of your problem right if

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=2550s) the little old lady down the bottom of the street is running out of food you know if that problem gets solved in a messy chaotic difficult way it increases the chance that somebody is going to get contaminated or infected in the process most of all her but possibly you right yeah right right the whole approach to this thing is that problems get handled without anybody making hurried decisions without anybody getting scared without anybody panicking you want a really calm methodical reasoned deal right okay we got good get this lady some food who has food that we could go take this lady okay who's got the least possibility of already being contaminated okay you having been excited for weeks you're not ill we're gonna give you the job of taking the food over there because you're the least likely person to be sick right now right and that sort of approach is like a completely different thing than what happens when somebody gets a call and it's like hey you know mrs. McGillicutty hasn't eaten in three days and she's really really weak and somebody has to go over there and bring her food right now oh my god it's an emergency people get emotionally upset they get kind of complicated they begin to get kind of angry with each other because they feel afraid and pretty soon you're dealing with something that looks like an episode of lost and right and that sort of episode of lost psychology where the situation is difficult and people make a bunch of crappy decisions because they're tired they're upset they're overworked they're afraid you know that begins the kind of cascade failure that results in a whole bunch of people getting contaminated because things weren't a thought about properly and they just ran out there and started working or and then everything went wrong see what I'm saying yeah it makes a lot of sense and I appreciate your balanced approach to this I know I started off a little bit panicky myself but I do feel more optimism and more hope for a potential situation that could arise with this coronavirus in conclusion I just wanted to have to follow up with two brief questions considering that we may potentially have a quote unquote lockdown where people have to stay in their homes like in Italy in the US what what are some and this is maybe kind of generic but what are some books that people could read in there maybe not spare time and if we're helping other individuals but what are some books that you would recommend

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=2700s) people to read during this time or in general so I would say any decent history of the 1918 flu pandemic could be really good and I can't tell you which one to read off harmed but there are a number of them and because you know you have to understand that like we've been through this before and although we've got tons of new technology at the end of the day the virus hasn't changed human biology hasn't changed so at that point right the virus is the same right it's it's not the same virus but it's the same class of viruses right it's an infectious agent that spreads in a way which is broadly speaking pretty similar to flu it's a little more easily spread than some foods are less easy to read than others but it's you know it's a serious thing and we've been through something much like this a hundred years ago and it killed a heck of a lot of people but in the areas where they got this kind of social distancing stuff right and people stayed away from each other they close the theater early throughly managed it well the mortality rate was half of the mortality rate in other areas right it was literally half as dangerous to live in parts of the country where they got this stuff right as in parts of the country where they got the stuff wrong would you that provide an example of Philadelphia and then st. Louis I believe where Philadelphia had a different like more ineffective response uh-huh right and the various where they got it right you know the difference was really life or death for huge numbers of people so you know is we kind of go into this thing you know it has to be remembered the you know everybody's at risk and everybody makes mistakes right point on what you need to be in this position where most of the people haven't made a mistake yet so when somebody does make a mistake you get exposed somebody but that person is not carrying the flu they don't have coronavirus so I keep calling that flu bad habit but you know if you get exposed to somebody and they don't have coronavirus your mistake has no consequence right whereas if you get exposed to somebody and they do have coronavirus now you have a problem right so the more of us are calm and methodical and do the social distance and stuff properly and stay they will hack away from people and you know we're not wash our hands in this cold 20 second thing where you have to scratch the back your hands and then you rub your fingertips and do all these little things you do right the more of that

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=2850s) stuff people get right the less consequence there is when you screw something up right you know you finally get into your car you sit down and you know the next thing you realize is you're rubbing your chin and you have enhanced washing you have like dumb hand sanitizer since you entered your car my oh crap right and at that point you know you've made a mistake like everybody makes and you're either lucky and your hands aren't contaminated or now you're infected right the more of us don't make the mistakes the less you get this kind of community acquired infection or just the viruses on everything right you want to stay completely out of that situation because otherwise you really do wind up the problems so you know if everybody takes care of their patch the total impact of that is the absolute minimization of the number of people that will get sick and the absolute minimization of the peak load on the medical system which means that when everybody is sick they could get bad rather than running out of beds and now you have real problems right well and yeah if you if you don't have any other books to recommend the last question that I have for you and thanks again so much for taking the time out is do you have any parting thoughts it could be in general with anything or specific to the pandemic so actually the thing that Walter Reed is not book the Audrey Lucas's report right so if you go to resilience map store org there are two documents there one is the skin master document which is called dealing insecurity and dealing insecurity is a really detailed breakdown on a flexible model for people to think about crisis together in a way that helps people adopt and manage and it's really good work so at 10 years old it's been used by a number of governments it's a it's a pretty standard thing then there is the Macaronesian Island work done by Lucas so Lucas has a 60 page document which details every layer of response from the individual right up to the state for dealing with viral infections at the NGO pandemic and that uses the SCIM model it also uses the OODA model observe orient decide act which was from an American Air Force pilot called John Boyd and that's a very standard model in the US military so this this whole thing is

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=3000s) about you dilutes right observe the situation to figure out what your risk is and decide how options you will or won't take to do something about the risk and then do those actions then go around again and do again right right and we're just tracking around the figuring our problems aren't avoiding you know the consequences so the skin dude a model is you use like you know observe orient decide act the skin model is for orientation you draw the critical infrastructure map you figure out your needs you figure out your exposure you figure out who your partners are and then when you get new information for observations you slot it into that model which is how you get oriented to the crisis then you make decisions then you carry out actions the skin model ISM is a tool for orientation and disaster make sense thank you thank you so much Renee if you don't have any parting thoughts I would like to thank you again for your time and appreciate your balanced approach to this I think that it's going to be a wise approach when it's one something disastrous like this is potentially gonna happen here well I mean it really is just applied common sense right you could talk to anybody from epidemiology they're gonna tell you much the same thing um there will be a bunch of specific details you know what kind of hand sanitizer works what kind of hand sanitizer doesn't work and there'll be people that have specific needs or insulin-dependent diabetic so you've got a whole other set rest you know there's all variation on these themes but the basic principle of this is a virus and you don't want to catch it these are the ways that it spreads no don't do those things you know this is not rocket surgery we can cope with this and what was the question you asked me right at the end when I went back and talked about Lucas's pandemic planning document I'm just saying if you had any parting thoughts and general thoughts yeah one of the things okay what's what sick another couple of minutes a really crack open another part with this okay so one of the problems that we have here is what I will broadly term Christian eschatology so eschatology is kind of the study of the end of the world and whenever something bad happens in Christian countries and I think this is probably true for Muslim countries as well the lens that everybody sees this through his apocalypse so everybody is like oh you know

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=3150s) business as usual is gonna be horribly disrupted in a bad way and immediately something inside of people's brains goes to apocalypse and you know pretty soon you're thinking about the Walking Dead and Mad Max and yeah all the rest of this imagery because you know one of the core myths in Christian culture is that you know the world will end in a really horrible way and it will be years and years and years of chaos and disease and war and bloodshed in this whole tribulation model so it's really important that we don't confuse an unusually severe outbreak of something which is not that different for a flu or a common cold but it's the kind that kills you right and we should also talk about age very proof that's other with two or all details that report so you know not falling into the idea that this is the apocalypse is really important right it's not the apocalypse if we did nothing at all right if we do no preparations we did no planning everybody continued business as usual and the virus run rampant we'd probably lose at the end of the day about 5% of our total population maybe tan and that is unfortunately completely survivable right civilization collapse if one person in 20 dies and it's mostly old people right what person in tan dies it's mostly old people you're really gonna feel that it's gonna be remembered for centuries but at the end of the day this is not a civilization collapsing event right you'd have to miss handle this in a truly spectacular way to give make this civilization threatened so we shouldn't be freaked out in this kind of like oh it's the apocalypse sense and I mentioned the age of the people right right now it looks like people who are under 60 have very very very low mortality from this thing right maybe the threshold is under 50 certainly for people who are under 40 it just doesn't really kill you and that's not an excuse to run around and not take precautions because if you catch it then you go to somebody else they give to Grandma you have an issue but this is predominantly a disease that affects the old and I am you know just about 50 not in great health I'm really burned out after your multiple years running a start-up I have some pre-existing lung issues from a super bad lung infection that I got 20 years ago so I'm in that demographic like I really don't want to catch this

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=3300s) thing right yeah but at the same time if I did catch it I'm not actually all that likely to die and because my underlying physical condition is pretty good and you know I kind of you know it'll be fine right so or or out I could go either way but it's it's not like I would expect to be 50% likely it I forgot it's probably less than 10% because I'm well out of the age group that really has problems yeah so it's really important to think about this in terms of you know what we're doing here is we're protecting ourselves and we're protecting the old we are trying to make sure all the old people do catch this at the same time and then we've got jag antic problems we're also trying to make sure that the young people don't catch it because they mean require a respirator super respirators a whole bunch of people die unnecessarily um but it's you know it's very fortunate that it's not like the 1918 flu because the 1918 flu preferentially killed people in their 20s in their thirties yeah that's right right so we're sort of in a position where you know however apocalyptic people might feel this thing is at times particularly if you work in a hospital why were you gonna have a bot here right Bob however apocalypse seems at times let us remember that we've seen worse a hundred years ago um you know we're gonna get through this because even the worst case is completely survivable right even the worst case completely survivable one last thing is that have you seen this I've seen some information coming out that there hasn't been a lot of reported cases in higher temperature higher humidity areas such as like Southeast Asia do you have any like insight into this or any thoughts on that so my gut feeling is probably the critical place to check is Australia because Australia has a public health system you know they are you know us hard drives it's gonna get this time if you're right right so I mean maybe maybe Australia is the place you know it's not like I've got a globe in front of me and I'm checking their climate data maybe in South Africa you know maybe it's at a Honduras but wherever is like finding a place of the decent public health system and seeing what the spread looks like there he's probably pretty important I would be

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=3450s) fairly surprised if it made that much of a difference right and let me tell you why right um this thing appears to generally speaking not the airport so it's not something that people are catching because individual viral particles are flying around in there and they're breathing them in it's generally we can contained inside of the kind of droplets of water the people cough mmm right so when the conditions are humid those droplets tend to get heavier because they absorb moisture there and fall to the ground um but that works the same way in either cold countries or warm countries seasonal foods tend to hit hot countries just the same as cold countries and generally speaking because of the contagion passing on surfaces I see so the surface contact stuff is the majority of where this stuff gets transmitted and if the surface contact stuff is happening there's your problem now the flip side of that is the other possibility is that what's causing these differences in transmission is ultraviolet light right right so it may not be the temperature and the humidity all those are definitely factors it may also be the UV light is killing the stuff on surfaces even inside of buildings yeah and I saw there was some Danish company that had these like UVC robots or something that China was implementing I might be wrong on this but they seem to be effective against it yeah you make a good point about that I don't thank you and you know there's one of the things I'd like to come out of this thing is that we start doing really serious research on all this stuff so the next time we have a virus to deal with hopefully not too soon and we actually know way more about it and we could deal with it on these levels cuz right now we just don't have the data for most of this right we just don't know right um so the the final thing I want to talk about briefly is like mental attitude to all this right so right the men allowed you to all of this really has to be pragmatism right it's not panic it's methodical considered response right it's done from a clear rational mental model about what the risks are and whenever you hit a position where you don't know what to do you're trying to research if you've got

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=3600s) the time to sit down at the Internet consult some reputable sources figure well the CDC says maybe ask a doctor you know if you could do those kinds of things every time you have to make a serious decision what we stay away from is kind of community-acquired nonsense right we don't want to be in a position where 25 million people decide that they're gonna all you know treat with with some kind of alternate remedy that doesn't work right if you heard of the dunning-kruger effect no no we're so - cycle we'll just stunning in Kruger and the hero case of a bank robber who robs a bank in broad daylight in front of all the security cameras without a mask and they're like why does this guy do this so they investigate turns out that he did this because he covered his face with lemon juice and they're like wait could you explain this to us no lemon juice is invisible ink so I covered myself with lemon juice so I was invisible I'm pouring right and their comment was a you know this guy was not only too dumb to be a bank robber he was too dumb to know he was too dumb to be around cropper and you know panic people get stupid right if you go all the way back through the medieval plagues and stuff your crazy idea it's like you know everybody's gonna go out and dance around in circles that's gonna scare away the spirits or it goes in the plague or you know whatever I'm making up that example yeah but you know we want to stay really close to the science on this stuff and that means asking experts for their opinions and reasoning from first principles about what you know about viruses you don't know much of our viruses go do some reading you know why does the virus live longer mucus how does hand sanitizer work there are people publishing guides on all of this stuff all the time a lot of that material is pretty rapid of what science-based it's easy to get your head around if we stick to that kind of material and act in calm methodical decisive ways based on a rational understanding of the risks we will lose the minimum number of people that we could have if we get into a position where we've got a whole bunch of cargo cult nonsense coming in and people are doing things that don't work and then acting as if they dead we're gonna have a whole new problems right so if it goes around that you know horse antibiotics are exactly ways you take to get over this thing and you wind up with a whole bunch of people that are trying to treat themselves with remedies don't work or

[1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=3750s) you wind up with people who've heard that you can mix hand sanitizer or oatmeal you know you're really gonna have problems right yeah and so you know sticking close to the science gives us the best possible odds of taking effective action and all that this boils down to in the end is we each individually and collectively and at the state level under the national level under the global level each take effective disciplined action and the some to evolve those actions across all of those levels of governance will result in the best outcome that we could have had and that's all we can do we try as hard as possible to make calm rational decisions and to actually implement it to make the hard choices when we have to and we just worked our way through to make the calls thank you Vinay thank you for your your your optimism I think you do you're conveying optimism and also your balanced pragmatic approach to this I appreciate it just one last thing where can people find you on the internet if they're not familiar with your work already um so my pandemic work is resilience map store org and my company is called material ma TT er um calm and we're gonna be organizing a bunch of pandemic flu resources keep saying pandemic flu current virus resources of material comm /c s are so we're gonna do about this whole corporate social responsibility stuff because two of my members to the members of my team myself on internal on off whose our MD and have really substantial infectious disease management expertise and we're gonna try and you know make some of that work available as we go while we continue to run the company through this whole prayer and coronavirus crisis great I this Bonet is an impressive guy if you haven't been familiar with his work I encourage you to check out more of his work thank you once again Bonet I appreciate it and have a great rest of your day I'm very welcome thank you the time to do this and otra Lister's find it you know I'm helpful thank you

---
End of [681] Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 1 with Vinay Gupta, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [249] A long, difficult conversation about dealing with... (2020) (no text here); the most closely related, [689](https://guptaoption.com/texts/689.md) Vinay Gupta - Resilience Guru | London Real (2014); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.