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.
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And ever will live through (fingers crossed :-|)
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Yeah, I don’t feel good about what’s plausibly coming down the pipeline.
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OWID says there were ~700 mio. cases worldwide in early 2024, but you and I know that’s a severe under-estimate.
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I do agree that governments covered themselves in shame.
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Believe me! I’ve looked!
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Exceedingly virtuous exceptions exist, I’ll praise the ones I know of at the end.
This isn’t a retrospective assessment, it’s the worst-case projection out of 4 scenario forecasts done in May 2020, ranging from $3.3 to $82 trillion over 5 years, using an undefined reasoning-nontransparent metric called “GDP@Risk” I couldn’t find anything on after a quick search.
Aw man I shouldn’t have trusted that number! It seemed a bit sketchy. I’ll edit it into something sane.
Edit: Fixed.
To be honest I was ready to believe it (especially since your writings are usually analytically thorough), and was just curious about the derivation! Thanks for the post.
I’ll have to go and fix that on Wikipedia as well, that’s what misled me in the first place. Thanks again for checking this! The best paper I’m finding is this one with six scenarios, them putting the cost between -$17 trio. and -$35 trio., so I wasn’t off by a factor of ten but instead a factor of two to five.
This takes you to a GWWC page that says:
But if you click through those links you can see there isn’t a biosecurity fund, and the list of biosecurity-related programs you can donate on GWWC are just NTI and CHS. Which are not bad options, but as someone in the field they’re not where I think funding would go farthest. It would be really great if there were a bio fund, or a bio evaluator!
(Disclosure: I run a project that would plausibly be funded by such a thing)
I stumbled over the word because there wasn’t a definition of the term earlier. I inferred that $1 trio is 1 trillion US dollars.
Is that what you intended?
Similar sentiments have been shared in the widely-read book The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. The 1994 book guessed that politicians would ignore the topic until it was horribly unavoidable and actively making them drop dead with blood gushing everywhere. I don’t recall the exact quote, unfortunately.
For those who have lost hope in the higher levels of government, consider trying to influence the lower levels of government where you vote is most influential. Many actions don’t require “big government”. VaccinateCA started with a few volunteers, which is well within the number of people that exist in the department of a city or county government. Monitoring the wastewater in your local sewage plant may not require the water department to get permission from anyone outside the sewage plant’s walls. Counting the number of patients with respiratory symptoms can be done with piles of rocks regardless of heap size. And so on.
Yep, I intended that to mean “trillion”.
I’ve never seen these abbreviations “mio., bio. trio.” before. I have always only seen M, B, T, e.g. $5B. Is it some regionalism or something?
Yup, it’s a regionalism that I mis-/over-generalized. I’ll avoid it from now on.
For completeness, I’ve also seen mil., bil. and tril. - but never with o at the end.
pertinent analysis from Rand Institute:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/external_publications/EP70594.html
“At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, human society itself was subject to a kind of penetration test: COVID-19. The virus, an unthinking adversary, probed the world’s ability to defend against new pathogens. And by the end of the test, it was clear that humanity had failed.”
I share your frustration and anger with how we dealt with the Covid pandemic, and that experience certainly made me a lot more pessimistic about our ability to deal with any other impending disasters like AGI doom.
That said, the first part of your post feels to me like it’s equating “we didn’t fund preparation for this” with “we didn’t learn from this”. I agree with the latter, but there are tons of things our civilization could’ve done that hardly required any funding (in particular, removing regulatory barriers, e.g. to things like human challenge trials), and conversely, we can and do put arbitrarily high amounts of funding into various topics without actually doing much or any good on them.
And separately, to me there’s a far more fundamental lesson from events like Covid than “Humanity learned nothing”: namely that there is no such thing as a ‘Humanity’ that could learn from things and that no-one is in charge. (On LW, this meshes with concepts like Heroic Responsibility and HMPoR’s Nihil Supernum.)
There are occasionally individuals and individual organisations that act with some kind of agency towards some particular purpose, and which sometimes accomplish good things (one I read about was VaccinateCA). But Humanity is not a hive mind, we’re merely the aggregate of a few billion humans, and while we do certainly act with more purpose and direction than the particles in a gas, we don’t ultimately act with that much more purpose. To me it looks more like we’re at the mercy of faster and stronger processes: like the exponential growth of Covid infections, or the seeming inevitability of economic and technological growth.
I have been frustrated every year when it’s time to vote for the local school board elections and none of the candidates bother saying how they behaved during the most impactful time for a school board in living memory. I really don’t get it.
I’m confused. This makes it sound like they did get the pledged funding?
Yup, that’s correct if I remember the sources correctly. I guess the tone surrounding it doesn’t match that particular bit of content. I should also turn the pledged/received numbers into a table for easier reading.
Right now it reads like one example of the pledged funding being met, one example of it being only being ca. 3⁄4 met but there’s also two years left until the original deadline, and one example of the funding never getting pledged in the first place (since congress didn’t pass it).
I agree this is a pitifully small investment. But it doesn’t seem like big bills and programs got created and then walked back. More like they just never came to be in the first place. 4.5 billion euros is a paltry sum.
I think this may be an important distinction to make, because it suggests there was perhaps never much political push to prepare for the next pandemic even at the time. Did people actually ‘memory hole’ and forget, or did they just never care in the first place?
I for one don’t recall much discussion about preparing for the next pandemic outside rationalist/EA-adjacent circles even while the Covid-19 pandemic was still in full swing.
Another contemporary example: ANTIBIOTICS.
I went abroad and studied antimicrobial resistance briefly, while doing a master in cellular biology. I did hands-on virulence research in safety labs, and a lot of theory.
Bacteria are simple. That’s why we have already exhausted all major pathways for drug mechanisms.
At that time, multiresistant bacteria were already everywhere. Resistant pathogens were found deep in the Amazon, and in Antarctica
Resistance will only increase. It will be bad. Could be real bad. Back to times hospital care can’t cure anything, only nudge your odds. And surgery might get tricky.
My dad’s grandpa coughed himself to death, at home, resting alone in a shed next to the house. This due to a bug that today is cured within days, without hospital care. Our children may suffer the same fate.
What did we learn? We have almost all of human history to look back at, but we don’t care.
But we are at least slowing down the overuse right? Not really. Overuse is rampant. Many countries, even western ones (US *cough*), happily throw drugs into healthy animals on an industrial scale.
In parts of LATAM, even the synthetic HC stuff is as readily available as painkillers. No need to think of doctor. No need for doctor to think.
But we are increasing research budgets right? Nah.
But some states are planning ahead? Sadly, no. We can’t do much until the overuse stops. Some countries have cynically said they will wait until many more people start dying, before they take any action. Too much effort.
And like nuclear waste, it will take a loong time to reduce the resistant strains. Given that we actually try.
It appears to me that in retrospect the response was severely overwrought. The numbers of deaths vs the huge costs visited upon children and young people who were at very low risk was a severely warped calculus—my own children are still showing impacts on their educations after 5 years. Young adults without co-morbidities and near zero risk needlessly had their lives disrupted for years, and the safety issues surrounding the poorly evaluated vaccines and clinical heart damage are not to be scoffed at for young to middle aged adults without comorbidities. It is not clear that vaccine benefits outweighed the risks for under 50′s especially after low infection fatality rate Omicron variant came along. We should not be sacrificing the young for the benefit of the old.
I will note that in New Zealand with a population of 5 million we had near perfect shut-out of covid, no respiratory virsuses circulating in 2020 or 2021 - and so less overall death, it was in essence a near perfect control group for vaccine safety. BUT we saw about 1500-2000 (5% more) deaths during the mid-late 2021 vaccine program (without any covid) than in the preceding year [edit, a crude estimate if this was vaccine caused is that vaccination had ~0.05% risk of death, far lower than for covid in elderly but far higher than for covid in young]. It is now reported in major studies that there was a significant increase in cardiovascular deaths in 6 month period after vaccination. The vaccine was probably a good idea for higher risk individuals, but a bad idea for majority of population given tiny infection fatality rate and unknown risks in minimally tested new-tech vaccines that had no long term safety data.
The colossal destructive economic impacts on countries by posturing safety-uber-alles politicians who entirely failed to balance their economic management duties in the decision making processes mean that the cost born per quality-of-life year added (QALY) to peoples lives was at least an order of magnitude above normal cutoff in state medical funding when making medical treatment spending decisions. Their over-reactions unfairly destroyed huge numbers of people’s businesses and savings, representing decades of work in many cases.
[Edit to give idea of cost to new Zealand of covid response was around $100billion, and it added a few years life to perhaps 10,000 mostly elderly or very sick who would have otherwise died (estimating from differential between extreme-lockdown and quarantine NZ 1100 deaths per million and minimal intervention Sweden 2500 deaths per million death rate), meaning it cost several million per QALY in a country where our socialized health system funds things like expensive cancer drugs based on around $50-100k per QALY threshold]
The education in institutional incompetence and malignancy, unchecked power, and irrational, excessive repressive instincts of many in the bureaucratic castes was very useful, and will stand as a life-long lesson and warning for many against the dangers of power in the hands of people who lack wisdom to balance their decisions in a rational way.
And there are now a large pool of laypeople who have a far clearer picture of how to react and what balances need to be struck to future events of this type—particularly in the way in which dangerous viruses mutate towards more transmissible but less lethal variants over time so that response can be dialed back accordingly.
What are you basing the claim that the vaccine is responsible for increased deaths in 2021 on? The NZ statistical agency’s 2021 report says that its due to an aging population and rebound from 2020 when isolation measures decreased rates of non-COVID winter diseases. Basically 2020 was an unusual year for the obvious reasons while 2021 was closer to normal, but still lower than 2019.
Median age of death seems to have also continued to rise, which you woudln’t expect if there was a significant surge in vaccine deaths among young people. NZ’s official vaccine safety reporting attributes 2 deaths to myocarditis following vaccination.
I fervently agree that the degree of inaction here is embarrassing and indefensible.
Here’s one proposed explanation, though definitely not a justification, of why the Biden admin didn’t do more. To be clear, I’m not saying they’re the only ones who should have done/do more:
It comes back to the wider problem that there is little demand and interest from voters in preventative measures, vs. things that have a more immediate visible impact. This is so sticky its remained even in the aftermath of a very visible pandemic.
So the natural selection effect of politics is always going to push against it. You need a way to change public opinion, or at least elite discussion, on the topic to make it more politically viable, otherwise you are relying on politicians and political parties to act against their self interest.
A slight counter to this, several countries have done, or are doing, major enquiries into their response. A good first step would be to give praise and attention to these and lobby for their recommendations to be implemented.
UK Module 1 on preparedness failures has been published and seems particularly relevant to your points. Excerpt from the executive summary:
Quick list of links to other countries reports that I haven’t looked into in as much detail but may be relevant: Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, France, Germany, Ireland, European Union (European Parliament COVI)
What would you consider to be the correct amount? And how would you calculate that figure? I assume something like, if we take the 5 trillion US cost figure, and a 1% chance of something comparable happening per year, then up to $10 bn yearly would be reasonable for the USA to spend?
I think a more concrete idea of what we are not doing that we should be doing would help with the call for action part of this.
A related takeaway is that good government matters a lot for a response. And if you live in a democratic country that should influence your decision on how to vote and what other political activity you engage in.
Partly you can just look at their stated policies on pandemics, or if they don’t have any it can normally be reasonably inferred from other things. You should probably also prioritize general competence and ability to react well to new information more highly, relative to ideological alignment with you, than you would have otherwise.
I’d be much happier with a post with the target I think you’re aiming at if there was some comparisons to as many other pandemic events as possible.
To be honest I don’t find the bit about global GDP loss or the lack of follow through with some planned program funding that convincing or even relevant. Most of the programs announced in 2022 were likely all suggested in 2020 or 2021 so likely more knee-jerk “we have to show the people we’re doing something” rather than well thought out. Then in 2022 and 2023 you have politics starting to dominate and since they are competing with other spending needs may well have been poor options for spending (compared to preventing future pandemics or other programs that also have some greater discounted value to social welfare and overall health). So not clear that we should take each or even any of them as good ideas we should have implemented.
Similarly, looking at global GDP from the World Bank data it’s not clear that the hit to GDB was as bad as claimed. Sure, 82T is a big number. So is 17T but over 5 years in the context of global GDP not so shocking. I think that was a case of seeing something big in isolation and so thinking it’s a bigger issue and it real is. Also, MR had a post about the impact to income in the USA and the government response. The estimate was the the lock-down reduces incomes by $15B a month. But the government support in response was something like $30B a month. A bit hard to see that situation supporting a big hit to GDP/incomes. I would agree that the USA situation is not representative of the world, but not too different from other developed countries (which I would include China in) and those are the countries that drive global GDP. The chart on the World Bank site supports the supply shock to GDP for 2020 but then basically a return to the prior growth path, or even a steeper one. So I don’t actually see that it’s an easy case to make that we had some significant, persistent negative impact to global GDP. As such, I’m not seeing how this might support any claims about human’s not having learned anything from the pandemic.
Feel like I should add one quick point as well. I think it’s a mistake to make the type of aggregate claim “humanity learned almost nothing”. That is either a claim that no one learned much or just wrong. as such I think framing the question that way is likely to lead one into a sub optimal analytic framework and so reduce whatever value such an inquire might produce.
We had a pandemic that might have been caused by pandemic preparedness funding. Increasing pandemic preparedness funding isn’t the most straightforward lesson to draw from that.
The fact that governments failed massively is a key learning from the pandemic. One of my most memorable experiences was when I was wearing my FFP2 mask in public transportation in Berlin which was legally required at the time and the security personal in public transportation was exempt from the requirement of wearing FFP2 masks and was wearing surgical masks.
While hospitals have regular training to make sure that it’s staff wear FFP2 masks properly, there was no public education from the government of how to wear FFP2 masks properly no places where you could go to test whether you are wearing your FFP2 mask properly but a legal requirement that everyone wears FFP2 masks.
In the US, the NIH stopped believing in the importance of science and thus didn’t fund any trials to see what you need to do to make community masking work successfully. Somehow, the policy position in the US ended to be that everyone should wear a cloth mask and people didn’t let non-NIH studies of community masking affect their habits very much.
If you have the government LARPing a pandemic response, the fact that the government shouldn’t be trusted is the right learning. The key question you should ask if what you could do so that the next time the government isn’t LARPing but actually has a decent pandemic response.
I don’t blame politicians as much as the infectious disease experts they listened to. These experts were slow to recognize that aerosols were the primary mode of transmission and failed to drop support for stuff that was of dubious value such as surgical masks and lockdowns in favor of the widespread use of respirators. Some of the most prominent experts even badmouthed respirators just like they badmouthed regular masks earlier in the pandemic.
The only defense against some of this kind of failure of expertise that I can think of is something I like to call a “thinking-things-through” form of analysis and is a retort to the “but you’re not an expert” argument. For some subjects like advanced math or physics, most people won’t be able to do this kind of analysis. But there are other kinds of expert claims that are much easier to evaluate such as the claim that masks could promote viral transmission due the potential for more “face-touching” or that masking could provide a false sense of security and lead to risky behavior or that masks offer decent protection (even though aerosols act like smoke and smoke can get past masks since they have huge gaps which well-fitted respirators don’t). In other words, if an expert tells someone to jump off a cliff to cure a headache, any rational person should be able to reason that that’s obviously bad advise. Of course, experts are still needed, but this can act as a check against at least some of their claims and perhaps weaken the groupthink that some experts can fall into.
Do you have any suggestions, or references to resources, for what individuals should do to be better prepared for another global pandemic?
Where?
So, how do we make humanity less stupid?
Feminism (Yes, really. Let’s at least have full rep.)
Education focused on thinking, not facts.
Support for reading, free journalism, books and libraries
Strengthen local community
Tax the mega rich
Social equality policies
Focus on children’s future, meaning look ahead, build the future, not the past
With my question I was referring to how humanity has less common sense then its people. I think to core issue lies in coordination en cooperation. You suggestions only address this indirectly. I fear chances like those will be too slow. Especially if we remain uncoordinated while implementing them.
I see. You should probably have explained your extremely open question better.
I agree with you on both points.
A lot that can be attributed to malice, can be attributed to stupidity and ignorance. It is said. But out of that set, a lot is probably misattributed and should be attributed to practical coordination challenges.
Competing short-term incentives cause this a lot. Each agent has limited information about the others, so incentives are misaligned. This helps explain both points.
Sidenote on the feedback on my comment: Wow, a lot of disagreement, but nobody bothered to challenge it with logic or facts. My claims when applied to rhe goal of society getting better informed and average rational decision making improving, are informed by a vast amount of sociological data, economic data, and government statistics from the EU and UN. So why no comment to motivate disagreement? Was the style too casual and not pretentious enough? (This was a big bias on LW already 15 years ago). Or is the average LW:er so quick to jump to their own conclusions? Or is there perhaps a lot of US anti-woke bias even here? I don’t know and I won’t know based on this feedback.