Coronavirus: Could the World Have Prepared Better for a Pandemic?

While all of these epidemics were serious, they weren’t on the same scale as COVID-19. This may well have led to business and political leaders focusing their attention on what they perceived to be more pressing priorities in recent years. In the US, for example, the Trump administration cut funding to disease security programs as recently as 2018.

The behavioral economists Amos Tvertky and Daniel Kahneman have developed the idea of the availability heuristic, which suggests that people overestimate the probability of things that are high profile and memorable, such as terrorist attacks.

However, the reverse is also the case, and the sustained absence of a pandemic such as COVID-19 – a high-impact, once-in-a-generation event – has led people to underestimate its likelihood and impact. A number of think tanks and consultancies provide early warning services about low-profile, high-impact events, such as conflict in the South China Sea. However, if they feature events that are considered far fetched, they risk losing credibility among their clients and readers.

Out Ahead
It’s probably no accident that a number of the countries that have responded effectively to the COVID-19 outbreak are in east Asia, where the SARS outbreak and H5N1 scares are relatively recent memories. For example, Taiwan has been praised for taking early action to contain the potential spread of the virus, and Singapore has been able to keep down infection rates through widespread testing for the virus, enabling effective quarantining and treatment of cases.

One key lesson that can be taken from the response to the pandemic so far is that companies and countries that are able to respond quickly, and change strategies in response to rapidly changing events, will do well. For example, videoconferencing software producer Zoom has made premium versions of its system available for free to educational institutions that are forced to teach online. This will expose large numbers of students to the company’s platform and brand, as well as generating significant positive publicity, which is likely to prove beneficial once normal life resumes.

Scenario analysis and some of its related underlying principles can offer some tools to prepare for and deal with highly disruptive events. However, they cannot predict where and when such events will take place, nor can they completely overcome the psychological traps that cause us to underestimate them, and as a result be underprepared. Perhaps our best hope is that by being more aware of these issues, and the fact that uncertainty dominates so much of our lives, we might be a little bit better able to respond to unexpected events, big and small.

Neil Pyper is Associate Professor, School of Strategy and Leadership, Coventry University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.