Full Report

This report goes to press as the COVID-19 crisis is ramping up. The World Health Organization has just classified the disease as a pandemic, and financial markets are reeling as it appears the crisis will cause the next global recession—or worse. Though we are still in the midst of this outbreak, it already offers three important lessons:

1. Early warning and early action are essential to limiting the damage of disasters. Governments that took swift and severe steps, such as South Korea and Taiwan, appear to have contained the outbreak in its early days, while most of the world has waited until containment seems all but impossible. This is true of all disasters that overwhelm public services. With disease, hospitals reach capacity and must triage. With earthquakes and storms, we see the knock-on effects of loss of water, electricity, and transport; the spread of illness; and a breakdown in society without prompt relief.
2. Disaster is inevitable, and always has been; it’s a condition of living on this planet. But the landscape of risk is rapidly evolving. Disease spreads more rapidly in a more populated and increasingly interconnected world. Although climate change is unlikely to directly affect coronavirus-type diseases, climate and environmental trends will change the global health and disease landscape in other ways. Habitat loss increases the chance of novel animal-to-human disease transfer, for example. Warmer temperatures extend the range and viability of critical disease-carrying species, most notably the mosquito.
3. The safety and prosperity of the American people depend on disaster management not only in the United States, but also around the world. Had COVID-19 been contained in its early days, its impact would be much lower. For other disasters, there is no contagion, but rather disruptions in global supply chains, state fragility, human suffering, and a moral imperative to act.

It is too early to guess the final toll of COVID-19 on human life. In recent history, epidemics have caused far fewer deaths than other disasters, thanks to advances in modern medicine. We hope that will remain the case, but the first few months suggest this will be an unprecedented global event in modern life.