I can't find any reference for the saying at the beginning. Can someone help?

I love this feature! really the one i probably lacked most on lesswrong. all the features you're considering sound good to me.

Even without finding the exact person who's sick, this can go along very well with community based approaches (as described here for example), where you try to find communities that have infections and isolate them from other communities to stop the spread from getting everywhere. its especially helpful when you have a large scarcity of tests.

I think an answer is mainly how "fat" the tail is, which you addressed.

i am wondering though, how much of the risks to animals in animal trials apply to humans. not because of difference in biology, but whether we can know how much we don't know about a vaccine before we give it, and only give the least uncertain to humans (cause i assume we're being less careful on animals). i guess we can't know much and my prior on testing vaccines was "dangerous on average, with really fat tail"

If anyone here is in or near Seattle -

This vaccine trial is recruiting volunteers in that area: https://corona.kpwashingtonresearch.org/
It's testing the safety of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that uses a new vaccine technology: mRNA in lipid nanoparticles; the idea is a few decades old, I think, but no vaccine using this tech has been approved for human use yet.

Is there an easy way to follow these daily updates or the corona virus tag i can recommend to people who don't frequent LessWrong?

Eliezer mentioned Korzybski here (though it's not part of the sequences).

Over all this felt more like a book review then a history or a biography essay. but maybe that was the purpose.

I heard there was a trial on monkey for a SARS vaccine that instead of making them immune only made the disease worse when they got it.

Related question, how dangerous is it to test a vaccine without animal trials

Hey didn't know where to tell the mod team this, so I'm just gonna write it here. I think the tag feature you used for the coronavirus is great and it'd be great if it was used for more things :)