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.