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

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [681], part 1 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=0s) hey this is James Aylor with the fringe voices show the fringe voices show is about bringing interesting people with interesting ideas together to converse to share these ideas with the rest of the world I hope you enjoyed today's episode with Vinay Gupta and again if you like this podcast you like this episode please rate and review it wherever you're listening to it Appl podcast or whatever and thank you so much and enjoy the show before we jump into this episode this is James from fringe voices I just wanted to let you know about anchor anchor is the easiest way to make a podcast it's free and they have plenty of tools that allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or computer an edition anchor will distribute your podcast for you so it can be heard on Spotify Apple podcast and many more places it's everything you need to make a podcast in one place so download the free anchor app or go to anchor a and chori FM to get started thank you hey this is James Aylor host of the friends voices show today I want to thank Vinay Gupta for taking time out of his busy schedule to speak with me about pandemics and specifically the corona virus Vinay Gupta is a Renaissance man and futurist interested in the technological transformation of society and commerce Vinay has a strong track record of thought leadership and environmental and infrastructure risk failing state's energy policy and disaster management he was also responsible for launching the cryptocurrency Ethereum and is currently the founder and CEO of Mattereum a technology startup for creating digital identities for the world of physical goods this is a long introduction though but for an impressive man thank you so much Renee for joining us how are you doing today I am a little fried this is a very intense time for me and you know we've just launched a product obviously I'm kind of sorting out my affairs to get kind of ready for dealing with the pandemic we're doing a bunch of resilience work to make sure that you know if members of the company get ill we can kind of have people cover their areas for a while yeah it's it's at a tense time it sounds like it and you know especially what's going on in Italy right now the whole country is on the lockdown and what made me want to reach out to you though is

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=150s) your tweet from a couple days ago when you said f it I guess we're doing the flu and yeah and how you're treating the corona virus going forward so I I used to work on large-scale disaster stuff I was a theoretician working mainly and think tanks and you know what I was interested in was just you know how do you handle like extreme worst-case stuff right I was mr. extreme worst case stuff and I used to carry a business card that says I don't get it bad for less than 1% mortality so my general rule was you know there was some model who famously said you I don't get that bad for Western ground darling so you know it was kind of a reference that I don't get out of bed for less than 1% mortality so when it looked like Kuroda's was probably had a CFR around 1% of people the court had died you figure a third to half of the population will catch at worst case you know it was kind of an you know this is gonna be really bad but this is all really my problem and because it was just outside of my area of direct real competence right Sam but then it's the news got worse and worse and worse I'm like okay hang on you know the CFR is not 1% of people get it though the CFR is like 3 5% maybe and we've got this whole problem with the enormous numbers of people that need respirators we're just gonna over em and I started to put the numbers like oh oh actually you know this may not be the big one but it's big enough that I actually have to pay attention and I'm kind of you know moral we were socially obligated to do something about this yeah and which I really agree with because as you may have seen Elon Musk recently - we did the corona virus panic is dumb I I just I find some like I don't know what the right word is for it but I don't think it right and do you think panic is warranted and if so why and also as a follow-up question B what would you think would be an appropriate response from someone with that stature that could use their money for social good well I mean you own musk is already completely topped out on social good right you know I mean he's doing superhuman amounts across a vast range of areas he's really really really completely deployed so you know expecting him to do any more than that is unrealistic frankly expecting him to even of a realistic model of what's happening the guy is not a

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=300s) microbiologist you know he's not an epidemiologist he's not a flu statistician we really shouldn't care what you one must says about things outside his area of expertise any more than we care about football players discussing pop music that's a good point I'll take that right you know it's kind of not his bag and you know okay he said something stupid about it but he said something stupid about an area that he's got no like demonstrated expertise in and nobody's paying him to have an opinion on this so I think you will I think you will Moscow this one wrong but you know he one must be allowed to make mistakes that's that's also a good point regardless of what Elon Musk is saying I know that especially in the United States right now and the current administration is talking about this isn't time to panic although they have the CDC has raised the red flag for citizens over the age of 60 do you think that people should be panicked or how do you think of an appropriate response would be considering what's going on right now so we keep using this word panic right like disciplined effective response is what we want and panic is generally speaking not really like you know if you actually look at what constitutes rational action is recommended by governments most of the things that they're telling people to do or behaviors which are generally thought of as being panic behaviors right the CDC has given up guidance seeing the people who are over 60 should get a bunch of groceries go home stay home and stay the hell away from people until this blows over so if that's from the CDC is that panic is that the CDC panicking or is that the CDC doing their job I'm giving out sound epidemiological advice which is stay the heck away from people if you're older exactly it's not really panic if the CDC tells you do it right exactly yeah I agree with that one other thing I wanted to talk about is that currently New York State last Monday had two cases of positive coronavirus patients and now we're up to 142 as of this past Monday yesterday I'm I'm worried myself that New York State is not handling or taking it seriously enough right now considering what's going on also with your experience what do you think would

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=450s) be an appropriate response right now so here we get into this problem with a kind of you know how do we know what's real how do you know what's happening how do we know what to do the bottom line right now is that we're all pretty information scarce about what is going on right like you know we've seen a few tweets going around recently and purporting to be reports from Italian doctors about what's happening in hospitals in Italy and those reports are super grim and I've passed that material on because it sounds fairly credible from the other things that I've learned in other places and it kind of forms an operational picture but I've got no way of verifying that those stories are true I'm not 100% sure then that's the whole picture you know how do I really know right so that's correct we're gassing right we have to make intelligent guesses based on the information in front of us and the bottom line here is that if you guess wrong in the direction of taking more action you wind up with a bunch of groceries and you close your office for two weeks or a month and everybody works from home it's a little bit of inconvenience and a little bit of capital that way if you guess wrong in the other direction and you take less action than you should have the possibility is that you get infected you wind up really ill or you get infected you accidentally in fact a bunch of other people one of them dies yeah so this is a situation where it's relatively harmless to take this really seriously and react very strongly and it's potentially extremely harmful to ignore it and think it'll all blow over so I kind of feel like this is something where it's relatively safe to take strong action and it's relatively dangerous to you know fail to act when you could have option or should have acted so I think that generally speaking we ought to be taking this pretty damn seriously and if it turns out that for some reason it's a dry run like on coming summer stops the disease in its tracks one possibility or we wind up with one of these rapid vaccine programs releasing something that works or they discover that one of the standard antivirals is completely effective you just have to use it in a particular way you know there are a whole bunch of things which could happen that will make this into a false alarm but I would much rather the people reacted appropriately treated it like a fire drill left the building in an orderly way then sat there saying hey this is just a fire drill we're going to

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=600s) ignore the alarm and then when you start smelling smoke you know like we've already lost the stairwells exactly and I'm I I'm an agreement with you and I'm by no means any kind of expert on the corona virus or pandemics especially but I do feel that there hasn't been that type of response especially in the United States I can't speak for the UK right now but I think the CDC guidance is super strong you know the CDC has really nailed its cover snow boss by telling you know older people to stay at home because you know once the CDC says look you know it's really important that you go home you stay home this is really bad for you get the heck out of town when was the last time the CDC's told any segment of the American population go home stay home it's really important you don't get this disease you know it's not like go get your seasonal flu shot it's a really good idea if the CDC is telling you that if you don't go home and stay home and you're older you're endangering yourself and you're endangering other people would you please comply yeah that's a good point what else does the CDC have to do right that's guys this is a real problem so I think the American opera has taken maybe a little bit of time to ramp up um but I think the American opera house ramped up hey you do see a certain amount of chatter from the White House like this whole thing is kind of overblown but again it's the Elan musk thick right I am unaware of Donald Trump having any substantial expertise in infectious diseases I'm far more inclined to listen to the CDC than I am to listen to the President on this issue yeah I like your balanced approach to this too I think that that's bringing some sort of I wouldn't I would hesitate B word saying this but it's bringing some sort of motor come to the conversation - I kind of want to switch gears just a little bit assuming that this is a like semi worst-case scenario where you know the government is possibly not going to respond correctly to a mass like epidemic of this coronavirus what are some examples of decentralized or distributed in the autonomous actions that citizens can take and for this type of pandemic so

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=750s) this entire situation is owned by a very very simple logic right I mean it's it's just there's a lot chapter there's a lot of complexity there's a lot of storytelling but it's all bound by a simple logic which is the corona virus is an infectious agent right it's a it's a it's a bug and if you don't get the bug you don't get sick and the only way that you get the bug is by coming into direct contact with either a person or a surface which is infected all right that's our that's our start and rules of the game are you get the bug by somebody sneezing on you or by touching something that somebody sneezed on praying the Russian I'm oversimplifying very slightly but it's not something where somebody you know sneezes at a football stadium of twenty five million people get sick right it's within the bounds of in fact justice order is very infectious but it's infectious in a way would disclose partial called talked and you know and sneezes and it's six old surfaces really effectively so at this point it comes down to don't have somebody sneeze on you and don't touch something that a sick person touched and if if everybody plays by those rules right don't get close to sick people and don't touch something that sick people are touched really pretty quickly the disease is not your problem anymore because it's nowhere near you you're not infected life is good what makes this complicate it is that people could be sick and have no symptoms which means they're wandering around the world doing order to be people stuff and they're also contaminating everything they touch and everybody they meet and this is the situation that we have right now we can't effectively discriminate between the people that are ill and the people who aren't ill which means you could be infected by people that have no symptoms so what this means is that we start having a say okay margin of caution is we have to treat everybody as if they're infected until proven otherwise and that's where things become complicated because now what we have is this kind of what they cultural but social distancing where we have to start assuming that the people around us are potentially infected and then we have to start not letting them seize on us and not touching anything they've touched in a really broad and comprehensive way yeah and I know you living in London and me in New York City this is kind of a complicated issue right it's kind of a complicated issue you can see you know what happens is you start from very simple basic principles of like this is

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=900s) an infectious disease and this is how you don't get infected by infectious diseases and pretty soon it builds out into you know quarantine masks gloves you know constant hand washing never seeing your friends staying indoors having food delivered and then squirting the delivery boxes which really open them right because from those first principles when you get active about okay so I never want to come into contact with this virus how do I avoid that it turns out that there is a whole bunch of ramifications which build up around that correct and one thing that I know people have been pushing back on especially in New York City is the mayor doesn't want to shut down schools only as a last resort and he has many valid reasons such as the custody and nutritional functions that schools provide but what do you think what do you think of this response and what are some ways that the learning and nutrition functions could still be provided with school closures so I mean let me ask a dumb question why are they so against the idea of closing the schools well so they they said that there's 100,000 us but there's 100,000 homeless students and they provide like shelter for them they also provide meals for low-income ha and also like for low-income families it also provides a way for them to take care of the children yeah got it got it so it's feeding and warehousing functions that they're really interested in yeah I mean you know bottom line sure but you know how long is it before somebody turns up at one of these places sick and then suddenly everybody in the school system is sick exactly right you know the Japanese closed all of their schools for a month ago yeah and they've had very little reported fatalities correct and the Japanese are really good at not seizing on each other right you know that thing we're an Asian people get sick they all tend to wear surgical masks yeah yeah so you you just don't walk around you know without if you have any kind of a sniffle you just don't walk around without a surgical masters we've confining the sniffles well if that's your baseline for the common cold

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=1050s) you've already got a strong model of infectious disease management in the culture which can then being rapidly built on when you get something much more serious like coronavirus makes a lot of sense yeah which I know around here we don't necessarily have that going on we do have a lot of closed social contact and people sneezing although it has been getting people are becoming more aware and mindful of it yeah people are becoming more aware is good star and I mean also there's a particularly American thing which is like you know you've got the flu you you know chug half a bottle of nyquil you go to work and you do like a 12-hour day and everybody acts like you're a hero exactly right and this is not really the time for just sort of muscling through correct I agree totally and I think you know that could touch off into some some other aspects of what's going on now especially politically but speaking of a someone actually I can't remember the name of it but I think there's a Congress person that is interested in a bill to implement a universal basic income in response to this potential I guess you could say lockdown of citizens beings you know out of work because of this pandemic what do you think about a universal basic income at this time and do you think it is a good response so I think organizing it in the amount of time that we have available is probably unrealistic and I just don't I just don't even know I mean you know think of the number of Americans that don't have bank accounts that you'd have to try to figure out with paying the universal basic income - yeah I gather I guess so I mean you know I mean I see absolutely the practicality right if you're going to expect people to stay home for work when they're ill on a third of the population or ill and you want them to stay home long enough so they don't in fact the other two-thirds if they go work when they're still ill then it makes perfect sense that you would have a universal basic income as a way of having people go home and stay home and it may be that there are social service programs that could be kind of expanded or leveraged to provide that basic income kind of bureaucracy the management of the funds but you know I just in the amount of time available I find it hard to believe they're gonna be able to get our organized in short in time for to have an operational impact

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=1200s) that's a good point yeah I'd it makes me feel kind of stupid cuz I did you think about that practicality aspect of it the other hand I mean this thing is gonna run for months right so yeah maybe there are rapid ways of doing this right you don't know you take voter rolls or something you know there are big available initial data sets maybe you could build up very rapidly on top of that maybe you deploy the whole thing as some kind of app and the whole thing works like your phone credit there might be ways of doing it you know if you walked into Google and said right you know you Microsoft Apple and Facebook you're gonna figure out how we distribute universal basic income and you're gonna do in you know six weeks they could probably figure it out right that's true you put enough money on the table when you go to the tech giant's and say make this work they could probably find some way you're doing it but you know getting that done realistically yeah I find it hard we federal government to be fast enough to deliver that in the available time scale yeah I agree just a couple more things I wanted to talk about if you still have enough time yes from another cause of concern is your colleague Luis Gonzales was talking about in a I think I believe he he had a document about pandemics that was with the European Union CDC where he has healthcare system insufficiency I mean I know what that means and and you do as well but could you briefly describe this and why this may be a concern with this coronavirus sure so I mean Lucas that I worked very hard on pandemic flu way back in the day if you go to a resilience Maps org that's resilience maps to org you could see a number of documents there one of which is a report the Lukas row on the pandemic flu and how you manage it in island economies and so Lucas was the head of pandemic food monitoring for the Canary Islands and in the Canaries and they've got you know two million people living in a place that has very little fresh water for example so there's a whole bunch of infrastructure to maintain to make sure that you continue have a fresh water supply there when Dakota people's knee so with all of this stuff you know the lesson is exactly the bottom line is how many people get the disease how quickly if everybody gets it very very very

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=1350s) quickly because it's very contagious then what happens is that those cases swamped the hospitals because everybody's second same time and the hospitals just overruled and then they can no longer do our services and that's a very very bad and very realistic scenario it's what we're seeing in Italy and once the hospitals are saturated anybody after that they gets ill it's very very hard to help because the hospitals are the only people with the tools the expertise to help even if what needs to be done is very complicated you need to start with hospital level know how to do it so that problem of we've just swamped our hospitals and people are still getting second we could number to help them is the worst aspect of the corona virus epidemic that we've seen so far and that's what's happening in Italy right now is allegedly in much of Italy the Gospels are not completely full the medical personnel are completely topped out and they still have to try and do the best they can but as a result mortality rates go through the roof yeah and I know that one of the concerns is like you said is in the United States and I'm sure the UK as well because in the United States we don't even have that many hospital beds that could carry you know like that much capacity of disease people so it is a very real possibility I agree it's a it's a real concern I mean it didn't happen in Japan because Japan has an enormous number of hospital beds relative to their population but the American system has got driven very lean by the way so we pay for health care and as a result with some football functions there's not much resilience to couch the problems and to stop the effects we have worse switching gears just a tiny bit I know that you have talked and also Louis has talked about the simple critical infrastructure Maps yes I wanted to just briefly have you briefly explain that for people they may not be be familiar and may maybe provide one example of applying this to this current situation so the simple critical infrastructure map system is a checklist based system which is intended to take groups of early responders and allow them to work through the situation that they're in in a way that allows them to get like good management of their available needs and resources so a typical model would be you know think of a small town where you've got the mayor the chief of the police and the head of

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=1500s) the hospital getting together to try and figure out how they're going to approach the coronavirus problem you can't use this for individual household level stuff and it will work effectively for household level planning but it's really aimed sort of small municipal planning where people are being pushed outside of their areas of expertise and there's very little support from the federal government or even the state government because the really severe cases are better than going to focus all of their attention and the people that are kind of muddling through are going to get neglected because those resources will be put into the areas which are worth it so for example the last news I will heard was that Seattle had a really big cluster and the conditions have gotten pretty rough in Seattle and you know obviously the federal government the state government who be focusing their attention there rather than on some small town you know on the other side of Washington state where things are basically okay because they haven't really had any cases yet and they kind of got on top of things and they're waiting for the problem to begin so that approach of you know don't count on federal resources don't count on state resources because they will ruthlessly prioritize to save the maximum number of lives that doesn't som you're helping you first means it's a very substantive degree when you're facing this problem you're on your own and as Lucas used to say you know the trick of all these techniques is going from you're on your own - we're on our own right if you go from you know a yo-yo - we'll go right how do we work together and the we is quite important because you know the supply chains are complicated things right you know if you're in a position where you're quarantined at home and staying away from people if you don't need anything you don't have that's fine but when you you know run out of diapers or discover that somebody has a bacterial infection on and you know needs treatment separately from the viral infection or you know somebody you know your dog breaks its leg you know you're gonna need help and the existing mechanisms that we use for organizing that help come under an enormous amount of strain in these kind of times people don't necessarily have money to pay for services and you may not have all the normal preconditions and supply chains that you'd have for example for veterinary supplies medical supplies you know even your basic stuff like you break your glasses and you need to find a pair that are good enough for your CI

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=1650s) of you need to be able to talk to people in a different way because you can't just go down to the opticians to get another pair made because those guys are closed so you have to think of this in terms of you do to organize enough interconnection inside of the community that people could help each other but not so much that they then proceed to infect each other it's quite a fighting line right you want you want enough of a network in place for you know mutual support mutual aid but you don't want such a you know you don't want people to go back into a position where they're infecting each other so the question then is how do you organize this kind of cooperative ISM and what the skin system does is it provides you with an objective baseline for working right gives you a starting point and this is what's so important it's checklist based so that you use this thing is you have a problem you have a bunch of people sitting on a Skype call or sitting around a table their job is to solve the problem the problem is how do we keep everybody under our care alive so you start at the beginning it go around the checklist checklist is individual needs right are the individuals under care having problems okay first is anybody too cold do you've any death or a risk of death from cold yes know if you've got problems that are being caused by cold those are your number one priorities you got sort of that first four people will literally freeze to death on your watch cold first second question heat is anybody dying of heat doing people that are getting exposed to heat you know have we washed air-conditioning and medical buildings what's our key problem so too hot right yeah too cold hunger thirst illness injury that conventional you to thirst is more urgent than hunger and but we put hunger first because we wanted thirst and illness to be next to each other because in most situations where you have a crisis like an earthquake the first thing that you're gonna hear is people are drinking water and to deal with their thirst and then the second thing is the water will be contaminated because of things like burst sewers and now you've got an epidemic on your hands so it's very much right this is really common post earthquake and you just wind up with a hole just parcel of problems because all the water pipes are broken there's water pouring out holes in the ground from broken water pipes and the water is also contaminated the problem so too hot to cold hunger thirst illness injury so in

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=1800s) this instance illnesses are primarily concerned and it comes down to how are we going to manage the illness situation and the onus situation you know the the skin model works across levels of political organization so you go from individuals households neighborhoods and municipalities regions nation states and then the global level so when we start talking about illness the individual level of illness is don't get sick right make an individual plan for staying away from the virus second part level of illness is the household level right make a plan for your household to not get sick now we start thinking about making sure that we as a team as all the people that are shared in the same roof and ER sharing the center of the same infection risk are all operating effectively to protect the other people in our household right then we say okay what about the neighborhood level this is where you start having to talk to your neighbors is here right so you know can we just make an arrangement where we you know call each other once a day just to make sure that nobody in that house is sick and if somebody is sick we figure out how to get them supply without causing new year factory to spread right layer by layer by layer by layer it involves making new ways of dealing with people because the old situation was you just walked into storage and bought things for cash the new situation is a lot the stores will be closed a lot of the people running the stores will be ill a lot of the supply chains that run the things to the stores will be down and you know the the thing about this is that what gets you in these situations is little inconvenience as the pile up and pile up and pile up until somebody makes a mistake mmm right you know you finally get into position where you know you've got everything together to make that one run we're gonna get in the car drive for the store you knew the store is open they know you have you know six crates of Pampers left and your name is on two of them and you go down there to get the nappies and then on the way back your car runs outta gas and now you have a real problem because you know you're gonna have to interact with a whole bunch of people to get home and any one of those people may be infected do you see how this kind of works you kind of get it yeah right deals gone bad cascade failure type stuff yeah so this is sort of how these things go is everybody's in the same boat everybody's in trouble but if everything goes exactly according to plan you don't have a problem right we

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=1950s) went to Walmart we bought enough food for three months I arranged that I was gonna work from home you know we are plenty of back cash in the bank to pay the mortgage you know the power company people kept their game together you know in the water company people kept the game together everything worked out fine and we just kind of waited it out with everybody stayed home and you know grandma didn't get sick and it was all great and some percentage of people will have those experiences on the other hand if you're you know an inner-city single mother with very little money who's relying on the school system to take care of your kid in the daytime where you work and that's what's paying your rent you know and then the school system closes or you know your workplace closes you've got a whole bunch of new problems you don't have the capital just go out and buy a bunch of food and then go home and wait it out so you're in a position where you're working and then shopping and then you're working and then you're shopping you're way more likely to get sick than you know some suburban family the basically just parks their car across their driveway and then stays inside and yeah so you get correspondingly more risk correspondingly more exposure but the thing is the infections don't stay neat we can find you know because they're this stuff is is that buy that go around there they become theirs and theirs so bullying is kind of suckling forward a business as usual in the business is usual environment it's inevitable the infection will spread so you have to kind of get away from business as usual because every case of the flu or what I call it it's all flu every case of corona virus that somebody doesn't get is one more hospital bed that's available for somebody that needs it right and this is the whole game at this point is we are trying to reduce the load on the hospital system to the point where everybody that needs an emergency intervention gets one because at that point we will lose the absolute minimum number of people that we could if we're in a position where we do a very bad job of infection control and a lot of people get sick really really quickly then the hospitals will overwhelm and you'll wind up with the same kind of crisis that they have in Italy right now yeah and I like how you outlined what the simple

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=2100s) critical infrastructure maps are and I know that people can find this on your website that you mentioned before the resilience map store correct yep and let me run through that a little more so okay you know so the individual level to hot to cold hunger thirst illness injury then you say what does it take to coordinate a group so groups you need communications you need transport you need work space and you need some social limit on the group so that you don't have a bunch of people kind of wandering around to take your resources doing other stuff with them right individuals groups organizations is a group that has a shared map of reality it has a shared plan relative to that shared map and it's got a shared model for changing leadership in the event that your leadership becomes that ill or otherwise unsuitable so that sort of context is really really important right you have to think of this in terms of how do I say this exactly um you have to think of this in terms of what would does it take for groups of people to organize into effective machinery to help other people or even to take care of their own needs right there has to be some way of saying okay we've all agreed about what the problem is we all understand how we're gonna work together on this and that ability to pull the pieces of that story together is really really important because if you've got a group of people that are trying to help but they haven't figured out a shared map or a shared plan and some kind of planning for how do you change leadership if something goes wrong then they'll be ineffective when the situation actually begins to unfold comes of miscommunication constant problems but up and up and up right difficult difficult difficult difficult so you have to get those things in place before you get everything straightened out right and once you have a story straightened out you could become an effective organization even if you just start with a bunch of volunteers step by step by step and then above effective organizations there's a wealth of the nation state with the citizens map of territory effective organizations and legal jurisdiction and then

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87lqZdVjQVE&t=2250s) international recognition so that stuff is unlikely to come up in this instance because the coronavirus is not likely to topple governments in most places but if you have situations like civil wars it's pretty important to have a model of how the nation-state level kind of interacts with the rest these systems because often just getting you know sovereignty recognized an international trade going again is a big part of how we stabilize countries that have problems and it's important to a model for doing that so this is a very flexible you know multi-tiered approach to defining what needs to get done in problems in a way that's actionable by people that are not professionals and handling these kind of crises Butterfield's professionals and whatever areas they're working in and suddenly they're thrown into this mess and they have to work together and make it all work make sense and that's gonna be a lot of people in the upcoming shenanigans right right and I think it was you that I was you that tweeted something about you were already talking with your building about how to take precautions against you know the spread of the corona virus and I think that was a good example of implementing this system correct absolutely because the building is my neighborhood and you know I've got to interact with the people in my neighborhood to try and do infection control the neighborhood level because if my neighbors aren't sick unless like we get sick make em and let me tell you that has not gone well because it's like well you know some of the neighbors like well somebody's gonna steal the hand sanitizer so well yeah that's the thing that could happen somebody else is like but you know there are four contact points right there's you know you open the doors then you go to lift door then you get your own front door then a bunch of our contact points where hey maybe there's new places you can catch the flu why you would rip your harness on sighs so downstairs because if one person doesn't use it they're gonna contaminate the lift right and that's an excellent point right it's an excellent point then the repeaters from China people would put pieces of polystyrene up beside the lift buttons and then they've covered the pieces of polystyrene in toothpicks and the idea was that when you you operate the lift you pulled off one of the toothpicks and you poked the lift with the toothpick and that was how you went up and down in the lift [Music] really clever right really a letter but also think about how bad things must have been in China that these kind of things became common that's a good point

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/681-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [681] Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 1 with Vinay Gupta, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.