Opinion | Why the coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to change the world, for better or worse

Crises come in two variants: those for which we could not have prepared, because no one had anticipated them, and those for which we should have been prepared, because they were in fact expected. Covid-19 is in the latter category, no matter what US President Donald Trump says to avoid responsibility for the unfolding catastrophe.

Even though the coronavirus itself is new and the timing of the current outbreak could not have been predicted, it was well recognised by experts that a pandemic of this type was likely. 

Sars, Mers, H1N1, Ebola and other outbreaks provided ample warning. Fifteen years ago, the World Health Organisation revised and upgraded the global framework for responding to outbreaks, trying to fix perceived shortcomings in the global response experienced during the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003.

In 2016, the World Bank launched a pandemic emergency financing facility to provide assistance to low-income countries in the face of cross-border health crises. Most glaringly, just a few months before Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, a US government report cautioned the Trump administration about the likelihood of a flu pandemic on the scale of the influenza epidemic 100 years ago, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Just like climate change, Covid-19 was a crisis waiting to happen. The response in the US has been particularly disastrous. Trump played down the severity of the crisis for weeks. By the time infections and hospitalisations began to soar, the country found itself severely short of test kits, masks, ventilators and other medical supplies.

The US did not request test kits made available by the WHO, and failed to produce reliable tests early on. Trump declined to use his authority to requisition medical supplies from private producers, forcing hospitals and the state authorities to scramble and compete against one another to secure supplies.