Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19

Summary: Looking over humanity's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, almost six years later, reveals that we've forgotten to fulfill our intent at preparing for the next pandemic. I rant.

content warning: A single carefully placed slur.

If we want to create a world free of pandemics and other biological catastrophes, the time to act is now.

—US White House, “ FACT SHEET: The Biden Administration’s Historic Investment in Pandemic Preparedness and Biodefense in the FY 2023 President’s Budget ”, 2022

Around five years, a global pandemic caused by a coronavirus started.

In the course of the pandemic, there have been at least 6 million deaths and more than 25 million excess deaths. The value of QALYs lost due to the pandemic in the US alone was around $5 trio., the GDP loss in the US alone in 2020 $2 trio.. The loss of gross world product is around $17-35 trio. over five years, my rough guess would be that lockdowns caused a loss of more than a gigaQALY (~4 bio. people (half the world's population) in lockdown for a ~year in total, at ~75% value of their normal time), and not to speak of e.g. long COVID.

Those are staggering numbers. Megadeaths caused, gigaQALYs lost, tens of trillions of dollars in value destroyed. It's probably the most war-like event most of us have ever lived through^[1].

Surely, then, humanity has learned its lesson about pandemics?

lol. lmao

Humanity seems to have learned almost nothing, and I'm being charitable here. Plausibly, in total, we have learned the wrong lessons.

Remember those pandemic prevention and preparedness bills and programs that were announced in the US and the EU in 2021, equipped with billions of dollars and euros and pounds to prevent and fight pandemics? The EU HERA and the US Historic Investment in Pandemic Preparedness? The Pandemic Fund? HERA was said to receive ~4.5 bio. € for 2022-2027 (allegedly 30 bio. € if you believe EU accounting magic for programs that existed already anyway), the US initiative $88.2 bio. The Pandemic Fund got pledged $3 bio.

You know what happened to them?

Take a good fucking guess.

Yeah, that's right. They were starved of funding, neglected, or mostly forgotten. So far, HERA has received 1.28 bio. €+1.27 bio. €+0.73 bio. €+0.358 bio. €=3.28 bio. € of the promised 4.5 bio. € (with declining investment), the US Historic Investment™ attempt has resulted ~$770 mio. of the planned $88.2 bio. funding allocation ($760 mio. to the CDC and a whopping $9.5 mio. to the Hospital Preparedness Program)) since the funding change didn't pass congress, and the Pandemic Fund has received $3.1 bio, with an unmet funding gap of $1 bio. as of the time of writing. The UK allocated £460M to pandemic prevention. Numbers are harder to come by for China, India and other large developing countries, but my guess is that there's even less investment there (and that there wasn't much move towards pandemic prevention there in the first place).

This is infuriating. It is unacceptable. Humanity is being completely fucking retarded. We got insanely lucky: The pandemic was really bad, but far less horrific than possible^[2], it was basically the mildest pandemic that could've caused global lockdowns. Basically every living human got infected^[3], many had their loved ones die. Nature shot us a very stern look.

Pandemics can happen. They can kill you. You should know better, here's a reminder.

There is some upshot: We have some increased technical capacity and knowledge, e.g. on how to manufacture mRNA vaccines, but there's very large swaths of people who have learned the opposite lesson that pandemics aren't real & vaccines don't work, or that the whole thing was orchestrated and governments shouldn't be trusted^[4].

Our reaction: Throw trillions at the problems while it is present and pressing, make large plans and promises, and then quietly forget about it at the best time to spend relatively trivial amounts of money on effectively preparing for the next gift out of Pandora's box. We've almost completely memory-holed the entire event, almost deliberately forgot that it happened? Who of you has asked themselves the question "What have I learned from the COVID-19 pandemic? What can I do better next time, or even now?" Who has heard others ask these kinds of questions?

Honestly, it's much easier for me to now understand what happened in Germany in the decade after the Third Reich and World War II or in China after the Mao era—a sliding off of the attention, a complete lack of fault analysis, of strategy. Large chunks of the population probably was small-t traumatized by being physically and socially isolated in lockdowns, and simply doesn't want to think about the issue ever again. There's no good history books even trying to untangle the hyperobject that was the COVID-19 pandemic^[5], almost nobody trying to figure out where our sense-making failed to, ah, make sense, almost nobody trying to steer the ship^[6].

Nobody seems to be doing any of that.

The cavallery's not coming. Sorry. This is the best we have.

Let that sit for a second or two.

Thus, my plea:

Think about it, at least.

Better yet, talk about it. With friends, family, internet strangers, non-internet strangers, teachers, students, homeless schizophrenics, one-night stands, gym-buddies, store clerks, whatever. Make sense of this hyperevent as it's sliding from memory. Try to figure out what happened, what could've happened differently. What could be improved.

Better yet, act. Vote for parties marginally saner on the issue. Prepare yourself. Elastomeric respirators, stocking food, hand crank radios, ask your LLM of choice for what's useful to buy (or consult your government's advice on this, if you still trust it).

Better yet, donate.

Better yet, use your life well. Staving of the festering tide, building armour, making weapons. Embodying wisdom.

To all those who do, thank you.

As always, I feel compelled to talk about AI, even if it's not quite the central point of the piece. (Spoiler: The central point is that pandemics happen, can be extremely bad, and humanity as an entity doesn't seem to have realized that or act in the light of that.)

I'll allow myself one observation: If your AI success story relies on people reacting sensibly to warning shots, think about that part again, hard. From my perspective, concerning the danger of pandemics, humanity got shot in the chest. Humanity doesn't seem to have learned anything from this. The purported AI warning shot needs to be either more drastic or easier/faster to act upon than pandemic prevention and preparedness. Pandemic warning shots are easy mode. Nature gives you a periodic warning, usually it gently boops us on the nose, sometimes we have to pick up our teeth with broken fingers.

AI, if generous, might give us just one.