It depends if you define “coronavirus” as the virus, or the whole cascading scenario we are in, and whether you take account of fear, coms and incompetence*.
If you consider India, where the scenario includes a national lockdown and secondary deaths from involuntary migration, loss of health services, malnutrition, impoverishment, a huge hit to the economy etc, this is really bad, and comparable to the 1930s, even in the context of malaria etc.
(Apology for not adding links/refs—I’m v busy on ALLFED pandemic work.)
If we had had preparedness in the form of a ready-to-go food voucher system in every large city, or tracing and “smart lockdowns” much of this secondary / cascading impact could have been avoided. Any good working group, if they included lockdowns as part of a pandemic preparedness strategy, would within an hour of interrogating that strategy have seen the need for such a voucher system, and that preparing and installing one would have been ridiculously cheap, compared to the downside risks and consequences, and that maybe a test-trace-isolate as done successfully in Korea and Kerala would be a far better approach.
So that would have taken preparedness work, and imitating best practice in Korea etc, and one way to do this would be through Foresight Institutes not dissimilar from FHI, Gates Foundation, Oxford Martin School etc, which ALLFED.info proposes for South Asia, as do others.
We also, need to understand why the SARS-1 lessons learned were implemented in some Asian countries but not in UK, USA, Italy etc and whether our governments simply lack the needed capacities-incentives-culture, and therefore it must be done by Central Bank continuity teams, private sector or new institutions with their own constitutional/federal mandates, which can’t be undone or unfunded by political whim or due to short-sighted errors.
*By fear, coms and incompetence I mean whether your theory of change is along the lines:
< academics do research and propose solutions → wise politicians listen and implement and never get confused between science and economic thinking and their own agendas >
or whether you take account that
(a) governments don’t always successfully limit fear in the population and that fear may drive mass behaviour as much as reality
(b) that how communication happens culturally may be a huge factor (compare NZ, India, China, USA, UK, Kenya)
(c) governments take decisions for a range of reasons, and simply presenting logical solutions to governments, even campaigning for them, isn’t effective as many people imagine, especially in high pressure or fast-moving scenarios
So your preparedness may require equal attention to coms/media/internal coms/Nudge work as it does to classic DRR, implementation science/scaling etc.
This is perhaps somewhat unintuitive to the EA movement, which tends to have very few people involved in behavioural and psychological science, with a few honourable exceptions such as Fiona Conlon and the Charity Science (Health) team in India which I believe includes Varsha Venugopal, Krutika Ravishankar, and Nithya Nagarathinam—they are working on SMS messaging to support safer behaviour during covid19.
It depends if you define “coronavirus” as the virus, or the whole cascading scenario we are in, and whether you take account of fear, coms and incompetence*.
If you consider India, where the scenario includes a national lockdown and secondary deaths from involuntary migration, loss of health services, malnutrition, impoverishment, a huge hit to the economy etc, this is really bad, and comparable to the 1930s, even in the context of malaria etc.
(Apology for not adding links/refs—I’m v busy on ALLFED pandemic work.)
If we had had preparedness in the form of a ready-to-go food voucher system in every large city, or tracing and “smart lockdowns” much of this secondary / cascading impact could have been avoided. Any good working group, if they included lockdowns as part of a pandemic preparedness strategy, would within an hour of interrogating that strategy have seen the need for such a voucher system, and that preparing and installing one would have been ridiculously cheap, compared to the downside risks and consequences, and that maybe a test-trace-isolate as done successfully in Korea and Kerala would be a far better approach.
So that would have taken preparedness work, and imitating best practice in Korea etc, and one way to do this would be through Foresight Institutes not dissimilar from FHI, Gates Foundation, Oxford Martin School etc, which ALLFED.info proposes for South Asia, as do others.
We also, need to understand why the SARS-1 lessons learned were implemented in some Asian countries but not in UK, USA, Italy etc and whether our governments simply lack the needed capacities-incentives-culture, and therefore it must be done by Central Bank continuity teams, private sector or new institutions with their own constitutional/federal mandates, which can’t be undone or unfunded by political whim or due to short-sighted errors.
*By fear, coms and incompetence I mean whether your theory of change is along the lines:
< academics do research and propose solutions → wise politicians listen and implement and never get confused between science and economic thinking and their own agendas >
or whether you take account that
(a) governments don’t always successfully limit fear in the population and that fear may drive mass behaviour as much as reality
(b) that how communication happens culturally may be a huge factor (compare NZ, India, China, USA, UK, Kenya)
(c) governments take decisions for a range of reasons, and simply presenting logical solutions to governments, even campaigning for them, isn’t effective as many people imagine, especially in high pressure or fast-moving scenarios
So your preparedness may require equal attention to coms/media/internal coms/Nudge work as it does to classic DRR, implementation science/scaling etc.
This is perhaps somewhat unintuitive to the EA movement, which tends to have very few people involved in behavioural and psychological science, with a few honourable exceptions such as Fiona Conlon and the Charity Science (Health) team in India which I believe includes Varsha Venugopal, Krutika Ravishankar, and Nithya Nagarathinam—they are working on SMS messaging to support safer behaviour during covid19.