Screens tracking share prices are filled with red at the New York Stock Exchange on February 28, 2020. | Scott Heins/Getty Images In the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, in those days when public spaces emptied and hospitals filled up, I used to see this magazine cover from 2017 being passed around social media. The story was a familiar one to me, because I was the one who had written it: May 2017 @TIME “Warning: we are not ready for the next pandemic” pic.twitter.com/0RxSSsE1i9— Alex Godoy-Faúndez (@AlexGodoyF_) April 5, 2020 The posts were all versions of the same thing: The warning signs had been there, we knew something like this was coming, why weren’t we prepared? All of which was true, and all of which I had been trying to get across in that story, which was itself the culmination of years of reporting on emerging diseases: SARS in Hong Kong in 2003, H5N1 bird flu in Indonesia in 2007, H1N1 flu in 2009. Surely I’d seen Covid coming too. This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve…
We’re missing the economic fallout of the Iran war — just like we did with Covid
