Coronavirus – One year later

On 27 January 2020 I made my first post on the Coronavirus. It was appropriately titled: Plague? | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

The above photo was the one I used for that post a year ago. A few quotes from that post:

“This is tragic but the worse may yet to come. The human toll is going to tragically get worse. The virus apparently can spread before symptoms show. One wonder how bad it is going to be before it is contained.”

and:

“There could also be a significant economic cost”

and:

“Don’t want to be alarmist, but this does concern me. We have not had a major world-wide “plague” since the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1920.”

and:

“The Coronavirus will hopefully be contained soon like SARS was, but the scenarios are frightening if it is not.”

I ended up doing a lot of other posts about the Coronavirus over this last year. In part, as a historian I am kind of aware of the significance impact various plagues have had over time. While we have not had a lot of experiences with such problems in the last hundred years, there is no lack of exposure to them in history. I could argue that if people had really properly studied their history and applied lessons from it, less people would have died. On the other hand, I am not sure I want to make that argument in a briefing to DOD on the value of historical analysis. 

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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