Ian Goldin - Terra Incognita

terra incognita/, tergin'kdgnit9, inkdg'ni:t9/ noun phr. E17. [ORIGIN Lantin=unknown land.] Carta mariner, Olaus Magnus, 1539. An unknown or unexplored territory, land or regin; fig. an unknown or unexplored area of study, knowledge, or experience.

Coronavirus pandemic:
the outbreak from 31 November 2019 to June 2020.
Copyright Johns Hopkins University and Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., 2020, all rights reserved.

In the first five months of 2020, COVID-19 spread to 188 countries killing over 400,000 of the more than 8 million individuals who tested positive, a small fraction of those infected. Maps of the coronavirus, like others featured throughout this book, highlight the ways we are connected and face common threats, as well as opportunities, in the twenty-first century.

In early 2020 when more than two-thirds of the worlds population were in lockdown, we were transfixed by a map. The bright red and black display, produced by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and ESRI, tracks the evolution of the most devastating virus of the past 100 years. While offering a terrifying hint of the scale of the 20192020 coronavirus, the data also provides a glimmer of hope. The number of recoveries, hinting at the heroic efforts of doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, paramedics and other first responders who risk their own lives to save people who are struggling to breathe.

We submitted this book to Penguin Random House as the COVID-19 pandemic was making its deadly rampage around the world. After the virus was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019, Robert joined a team of epidemiologists and statisticians to help model its trajectory around the world, with a view to identifying ways to contain it. When stock-markets started to crater, wiping out over $9 trillion in a single week, Ian took to the airwaves to remind listeners about past crises and how to end them. Among our biggest enemies then as now were conspiracy-peddling and science-denying politicians and pundits. While we cannot predict how this crisis will end, we know it will have lasting effects on globalisation and many aspects of our lives. The COVID-19 pandemic reveals the systemic risks that accompany accelerated connectivity. It is a reminder of how our fates are inextricably bound together and that cooperation, while not inevitable, is essential. Denialism and inaction on the many known existential threats we face be they pandemics, climate change or weapons of mass destruction are not just dangerous, they are downright criminal.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and disrupted our lives in unfathomable ways. Many of us cancelled plans, took time off work, cared for sick relatives, and lost loved ones before their time. The impacts were often sudden and substantial. In early March 2020, Robert was on a sabbatical in New York City. After crunching the global numbers on COVID-19, he decided to examine more closely the situation in his own backyard. Unsettled by his own statistical projections, he took a quick stroll around future hot spots only to find the streets jam-packed with people completely oblivious to social distancing. Robert packed-up his apartment that same day, hired a truck, and moved his family across the border to his native Canada where he worked with Ian, who was locked-down in Oxford in the UK, to finalise the book. A few days after Robert left New York, Canada and the US shut their border and flights to Brazil, where he normally lives, were cancelled. Within a few weeks, New York became the global epicentre of COVID-19, registering tens of thousands of fatalities and a quarter of all infections in the US.

While throwing all our lives upside down, the COVID-19 pandemic starkly highlights the purpose of this book which is to identify and visualise the worlds most pressing global challenges and solutions. COVID-19 will not kill globalisation, but it will certainly reshape it. The outbreak also exposes the vices and virtues of globalisation. In a hyper-connected world, contagious viruses move more rapidly and widely than ever before. Their ability to infect not just people, but also politics and economics, is instantaneous. Owing to highly integrated global supply chains, the disruption of just one producer can have cascading effects with unpredictable consequences. Yet despite calls to de-globalise and shorten supply chains, the world is bound together by the internet and communities committed to sharing information about how to fight damaging outbreaks. The sheer diversity and abundance of producers, sellers and consumers can bolster resilience: even when several are disrupted, the multiplicity of networks and nodes keeps the system chugging along. We experienced these impacts first-hand as this book went to press: Penguin Random House had to change plans and move printers to Italy from China, where printing presses were largely out of action for a few months due to the pandemic.

Despite being more exposed to dangerous viruses than ever before, we have never been better prepared. Governments, businesses and societies are in good shape to weather global crises. The ostrich-like leaders of Brazil, Belarus, Nicaragua, Turkmenistan and even China and the US delayed efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, but, for the most part, science informed government responses, including health moves to slow its impact on vulnerable populations. The first victim, believed to be a US soldier, was traced back to an army base in Kansas in March 1918. Within months the virus had spread from the US by ships taking troops to fight in the trenches of France and Germany, killing millions. By the end of the year, a second vastly more destructive wave had spread to Australia, Japan, India and eventually China. As the old saying goes, history does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

A century ago, the world was totally ill-prepared for a pandemic outbreak and there were no molecular biologists or virologists who could determine the genetic sequence of influenza. Indeed, most doctors did not even know that the disease was caused by a virus at all. Nor were there any antiviral drugs or vaccinations available to protect people from contracting the disease these would only emerge decades later. There were no global institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), or even competent national ones like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its counterparts in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia, to survey and track the spread of new illnesses. Instead, information about the pandemic was almost non-existent, not least because of war-related censorship.

The spread of the 19181919 influenza pandemic (Spanish Flu)
The 19181919 influenza pandemic, or Spanish Flu, claimed up to 50 million lives. At least 675,000 US residents died from the virus, three times more than from the entire First World War. It spread in three waves around the world, first from North America to Europe and then to Africa and Asia.

Today, despite incredible progress across most metrics of wellbeing, the international community failed to deter the spread of COVID-19. Many of the measures adopted by countries like China, Italy, France, Spain, the UK, and the US to contain COVID-19 during the first few months of 2020 bore a striking resemblance to the ones introduced between 1918 and 1919, and even during the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Then, as now, physical distancing was encouraged, quarantines were imposed, affected communities were isolated, handwashing was promoted, and strategies were introduced to prevent large crowds assembling. While they did not know exactly what the cause of the mass death was many people believed it was bad air, or miasma local authorities understood that healthy people needed to be separated from sick ones. In the absence of a vaccine and given the sorry state of global leadership, this is probably the best that todays most advanced societies could muster.

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