The Covid-19 pandemic is not over, but it is already clear that Lord Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, has won his 2017 bet with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker that "bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than Dec. 31, 2020." Last year, according to Johns Hopkins University, the SARS-CoV-2 virus claimed the lives of 1.8 million people. The global death toll could exceed 5 million by Aug. 1 — or 9 million, if one accepts the drastic new upward revision by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. It could have been worse, of course. In March 2020, some epidemiologists argued that, without drastic social distancing and economic lockdowns, the ultimate death toll could be between 30 million and 40 million. Yet the cost of such nonpharmaceutical interventions has been enormous — for the U.S. alone, an estimated 90% of GDP. Lord Rees's was only one of many warnings before 2020 that humanity's most clear and present danger was a new pathogen and the global pandemic it could cause. Yet somehow these warnings did not translate into swift, effective action in most countries when a pandemic struck. Why did so many democracies handle this crisis so badly?
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