Virologists, epidemiologists, and public health experts are unanimous in their opinion that humanity got off relatively lightly with the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite five million reported as killed directly by the virus, and around 15 million excess deaths in total according to the World Health Organization (WHO), most people who were infected have recovered. SARS-CoV2 turned out not to be the civilization-threatening virus or bacteria that they had been expecting and preparing for. It wasn’t the “Big One.”

It is a certainty that there will be other pandemics. The emergence of novel infectious diseases is a condition of living on the planet. Their rapid spread across borders is a condition of modernity — of the extent of trade, travel, high-speed transport, and migration that it affords us. In the fourteenth century, it took over a decade for the bubonic plague to spread along the Silk Road from southwestern China to Italy. Today, pathogens can catch a lift on a holidaymaker flying home and cross the world in a single afternoon. Deforestation significantly exacerbates the threat, but even a world with much more extensive forest protection would not be able to avoid outbreaks.

Perhaps with the next pandemic, we will get lucky once more. The chance in any given year of another outbreak with a similar impact to COVID-19 is one in fifty, according to a 2021 assessment. The lifetime probability of anyone reading this essay experiencing another pandemic on such a scale is 38 percent.