COVID, an Modern Example of Cascading Disasters or Something Else?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7481846/
Network cascades 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic disaster is a devastating example of network cascades in today’s interconnected society. As stated in Daniel Felsenstein et. al.’s paper Cascades – Mapping the multi-disciplinary landscape in a post-pandemic world, the field of disaster risk management has become increasingly involved in addressing the effects of cascading disasters that inevitably turn an insulated event into a worldwide crisis. The problems arise in how economic, social, and natural networks have become connected, which aids in the speeds at which cascades can occur. Daniel Felsenstein et. al. explains that the root of COVID-19’s disaster cascade can be related to the theory presented by Edward Lorenz called the”butterfly effect” in which non-linear and random events initiate network cascades.
An example of this can be seen in the way in which COVID-19 traveled through the interconnected paths between social and economic networks. For instance, the spread of the virus took advantage of the social inequalities in the economic sphere. Low-income populations became the most high-risk areas of contageon. This is due to how essential workers operating in jobs that involve high-contact are disproportionatly made up of people on the lower economic spectrum. As a result the advent of lockdown implemented to contain the social spread of the virus, intiated a cascade in economic disasters that disproportionately effected economic populations dependent on high-contact jobs (low-income populations).
I found this analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic and its relation to network cascades extremly interesting. Through analyzing the paths in which COVID spread through interconnected networks the 2020 pandemic is a sobering example of the strength and deterministic nature of network cascades.