It is still too early to make any reliable judgments as far as the extent of theunfolding Covid-19 pandemic wave is concerned: If official data are correct, it may be dying down in China and it appears to be manageable in South Korea and Taiwan but it is still overwhelming in Italy, Spain, and France and it is in its early exponential phase in the U.S. We cannot be sure if, and with what intensity, the second or even the third wave might come. Over a decade ago, I published “Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years,” in which I sought not to make forecasts but to provide a close, critical, interdisciplinary look at events that could (in an instant) “change everything” and to offer historical perspectives.
In that book I concluded that another viral pandemic in the near future was certain and that we would be unprepared for it. Of course, I could not have guessed just how unprepared the U.S., so often called the only superpower, would be. In the excerpt featured below, I look at pandemics that ravaged the world.
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