Looking Back on That Time I Predicted COVID-19

Even I thought I was being an alarmist

Sep 15, 2023

I’m still on vacation in sunny Brussels, home of the famous sprout (as well as a couple of even tastier food items) so I don’t have anything new and in depth for you this week, but lying in hotel beds with a laptop on my chest always brings back a peculiar memory for me—researching the implications of a hypothetical global flu or flu-like pandemic, barely two years before you-know-what landed.

This was 2017, and it was the same holiday during which I proposed to my wife. I was working as a columnist for Cracked and had been given an assignment to research existential threats to human civilisation. You know, the kind of irreverent doomerism that was bread and butter for America’s Only Comedy Site back in the day.

Lying in bed in a Melbourne hotel with my new fiancée trying to get to sleep next to me, Googling terms like “future volcano disaster” and “end of world drought.” One thing I thought to look into was whether it was possible for another Spanish Flu-like disease to decimate the world.

Spanish Flu always fascinated me, particularly the way it dwarfed a World War in terms of the scale of tragedy but was, at the same time, overshadowed by it in historical importance. You ask someone to name the worst pandemic in human history and most will still say the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague centuries ago, not Spanish Flu barely a hundred years ago.

Here is the resulting column (click to read).

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Keep in mind that I did not choose, and do not like, the title. What the hell does “huge apocalypse” mean? Like, imagine a regular apocalypse—the literal end of the world—and now imagine what a particularly huge version of that would look like. Doesn’t really fit an article that features examples like “a pretty big storm.”

But then, hyperbole is what we were going for. You have to excite people. And that feeds into my next point, which is that I did not believe, in 2017, that another pandemic would ever happen. Even when I was researching it, and even when I was writing clickbait to insist as strenuously as I was capable of faking it that it could and would.

You can see my skepticism bleed into the piece even as I tried not to show it:

When it comes to diseases, people pay too much attention whatever snazzy new outbreak is dominating the news. Zika, Ebola, SARS

and

Since the Spanish Flu, there hasn't been a decade without some panic over a new influenza strain -- usually some kind of bird flu or swine flu.

This was actually how I felt about the never ending treadmill of pandemic scares. I was exhausted by the warnings that never panned out and that I thought were hysterically warning about some kind of The Stand situation.

This served as a learning point for how I process information. I never lied or made anything up at Cracked—everything I wrote about was backed up by the most reliable authorities and sources I could find. I wasn’t perfect, I showed my whole ass a couple of times, but I reported accurately wherever I could.

So the sources I used to write about the possibility of a super contagious and deadly flu-like disease jumping from animals to humans, and the revelation that society would be terrifyingly unprepared for this if it happened, were real sources. I recognised their authority, but I didn’t believe them. It’s just one of the ways our brains protect us from information that we don’t want to be true.

Anyway, the fact that this came true so soon after writing about it might give you pause about the other “huge apocalypses” on this list.

According to the latest information, the California megastorm is still coming, the Italian supervolcano is “at a greater risk of rupture than ever,” and a supercomputer has determined that another dust bowl is still a probability.

So, you know. Sleep tight.

Plato Was a Dick will return to regular weekly content on Friday September 22.