The Man Who Saw The Pandemic Coming by Nautilus is a great article. I’ve been writing about the lessons we should learn from COVID-19, the biggest of which is that we are all connected such that a virus on the other side of the globe can find it’s way to you in the United States. At the heart of this is putting our heads in the sand in the name of “America First,” which is the same mentality that existed prior to World War II and lead to World War II. As memories of the atrocities that occurred during during World War II fade we have been moving back in to an isolationist shell that puts all our lives in danger. Just because you don’t like the implications of this does not mean ignoring will cause it to go away. It’s time to wake up, put on our big boy and girl pants and deal with reality.
Second, governments and society by and large are governed by inertia. We don’t change and adapt and evolve very quickly. And we’re barely cognizant as a global society that the world we’re living in today is fundamentally different than the world our species has ever lived in. You know that old saw that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will leap out. But if you take that same frog and put it in a pot of ambient water and slowly crank up the temperature, it will stay in that water and boil to death. It loses perspective on the changing environment around it. We’re that frog in the ambient water. We’re oblivious to the conditions that have enabled zoonotic viruses to become integrated into us.