Hidden risks are sneaky. They allow you to safely ignore their existence for a while, building up in secret and waiting for the tipping point. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The outbreak of COVID-19 gives us a glimpse of the vast array of factors that make modern civilization vulnerable to large-scale collapse, ie. the “cost of civilization.” With the benefit of hindsight, only the most naive can utter phrases like “no one could have seen this coming” and “this was a one in a million occurrence.” Besides exposing the ill-preparedness of political and healthcare systems, this pandemic has also shown our incompetence in thinking about risk and how prevalent “naive rationalist” thinking about risk is. Given what we know about the origin of such diseases and our lack of preparation and prevention, it was only a matter of time before the next one arrived to wreak havoc on a large scale.

China deserves its share of the blame, but it would be short-sighted to single them out. The way we obtain food from animals, whether through general factory farming or “wet markets” in China, gives pathogens abundant opportunities to evolve into deadlier strains. Fast and frequent air travel allows diseases to propagate across international borders. This global pandemic should teach people not to obsess over mortality rates. Even if COVID-19 kills a tiny fraction of those infected, it has the potential to infect a very large number of people, owing to its ability to jump from a host to new victims even before the host experiences symptoms. That is why it has proven to be so difficult to contain. Economic fallout is already very severe, who knows what is to come. The secondary deaths, caused indirectly by the pandemic, have undoubtedly started to pile up, regardless of anyone paying attention. How man people will die because they lost their job or couldn’t get medical treatment. We will have to wait a while to tally up the true casualties.

When you’re in the middle of a crisis, it seems like the end of the world every time. Although this is the ignorant line of reasoning used by many to initially dismiss the COVID-19 pandemic as another false alarm like SARS or H1N1 (not that they were really false alarms, we just got lucky), there is some truth to it. People living in the middle of something have a distorted view of how their current situation will eventually fit into the grand narrative of history. This is why supposedly ordinary things can go on to have a huge impact, while seemingly epoch-making changes can fall by the wayside on the road towards recognition. That is why I hesitate to speculate about how COVID-19 will shape our future.

It seems obvious that the current pandemic will have some lasting impact, due to the sheer scale of the crisis. People may have short memories but humanity as a whole has shown itself capable of learning some lessons when the consequences are large enough. However, whether the right lessons are learned remains to be seen. World War I taught European powers to keep Germany in check, which lead to World War II instead of averting it. World War II spawned the nuclear arms race and a potentially far more catastrophic third war, because apparently the only way to prevent your own annihilation is to make sure that it would wipe out everyone else too. In case of pandemics, there is more reason to be optimistic since countries that have had to cope with SARS seem to be handling the current pandemic well, so the experience was beneficial. The thing to worry about is to that the potential for global pandemics is built into the structure of modern civilization. Prevention is hardly realistic if the status quo prevails and no radical changes are made. The best we can hope for is mitigation.