Indeed but we wouldn't even be talking about that if it were not for the investigations done so far revealing that as a likely cause. And only discovered under court rulings requiring people to divulge information they were otherwise refusing to let out.
It's a bit like looking at the 737-MAX crashes and saying the investigation was pointless. Planes should be designed not to crash regardless, don't you agree?
> It's a bit like looking at the 737-MAX crashes and saying the investigation was pointless. Planes should be designed not to crash regardless, don't you agree?
Do we live in a world of airplanes of all makes and models probabilistically falling out of the sky as a guaranteed characteristic of airplanes?
If so, yes, focusing on debugging a 737-MAX crash that happened to be completely full and hit an occupied building on the ground (therefore extra horrific/attention-grabbing) would be pointless.
Doubly so if the evidence required to root cause it was evaporated upon impact.
Triply so if people decided they had to know what caused that specific crash before they could address the probabilistic falling of airplanes out of the sky.
> Do we live in a world of airplanes of all makes and models probabilistically falling out of the sky
This statement and others you've made about dice and probability suggest that you think actions of humans bear no weight on probability of infection or outbreak. History teaches us otherwise.
No, I believe that the specific cause of a previous outbreak does not significantly change the probability distribution of future outbreaks, and therefore informs very little about the appropriate mitigations against future events.
> I believe that the specific cause of a previous outbreak does not significantly change the probability distribution of future outbreaks
If humans didn't learn and adapt, that may be true. And in that scenario we would all be suffering from cholera, still drinking from the community well John Snow identified in 1854.
Note that he didn't need to identify which specific bacteria was causing the infections. He needed to know which well to remediate and that chlorine would remediate it.
If he decided not to chlorinate the well in order to fully decide which specific bacteria was causing cholera, that would have been stupid.
The additional information would not have been worth the cost of acquiring it.
It would not have changed anything about the correct remediations and it would have incurred significant cost to acquire that information.
> If he decided not to chlorinate the well in order to fully decide which specific bacteria was causing cholera, that would have been stupid.
Thankfully that is not the choice anyone is confronted with. John Snow identified and treated the well and also proposed the first substantially complete and correct model for the cause of the disease. Both efforts informed each other and contributed to the solution which may not have been possible otherwise.
Proponents of the miasma theory surely thought he was wasting his time.
Fillipo Pacini isolated the bacterium the very same year. How wonderful it is that we can all collaborate to solve many aspects of the same problem.
Instead of continuing to muddy the conversation why don’t you just settle it by providing a clear answer to this question?:
What should we do differently depending on the outcome?
The miasma alternative for cholera is another excellent illustration of my point, not yours. The answer to whether miasma theory or contaminated wells was correct very obviously had bearing on how you’d mitigate the problem, and this characteristic was totally evident even before answering the question.
If someone could specifically state what we should do differently depending on the answer, I’m amenable to it. But you haven’t done that because the answer is: nothing!
