ABSTRACT
The SARS-CoV-2 virus took the world by surprise in 2020 despite repeated warnings from the medical science community, following other 21st-century epidemic outbreaks, that a global pandemic might not be far away. This chapter reviews some of the pre-2020 pandemic research and discussions that underlined how these outbreaks can occur and how easily they can spread. Some recent outbreaks were caused by influenza, but there were two caused by coronaviruses that spread across national borders. Particularly poignant warnings were issued by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates that a global pandemic would devastate the world’s economies and then by epidemiologist Ralph Baric who warned that the conditions under which new viruses could jump into humans from animals were getting worse. Less than a year before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, America’s Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, warned a new influenza pandemic could cause countless deaths. Recounting the timeline of events during the early phases of the 2020 outbreak showed how quickly the new virus spread from China, where it was first identified, to Europe and other parts of the world. Many countries’ health systems were caught ill-prepared to cope with this kind of public health crisis despite earlier warnings of the risks of such outbreaks and the strain under which health services would be placed by them. Just four years before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, the UK government ran a simulation to stress test the capacity of its health and social services when confronted with a new viral pandemic. The results showed that this kind of event would stretch health services to the limit and parts of it were not sufficiently prepared or resourced to cope. Yet, despite its many recommendations, the UK government appeared not to have learned from this exercise as COVID-19 took hold in 2020.
