I agree with all of this (minus “misleading” — Wimbledon’s challenge was same in kind, though vastly easier). It’s an epic poem of a subject and I had space for a haiku. So here are a few more thoughts about something we’ll be discussing for years. 1/x https://twitter.com/gmbutts/status/1249633269638930432

Preparedness is a spectrum, not a binary. It’s also multiple categories. It’s possible an organization may have one aspect of a threat squared away while having down nothing about others. 2/x

Preparedness isn’t done in a vacuum and shouldn’t be judged in a vacuum. There are many threats that requires preparedness, resources are limited, and there are many competing demands for resources beyond preparedness. What were the tradeoffs? Why/how were they made? 3/x

Similar, pandemics are (by definition) multinational. So preparedness must not be judged only at the national and subnational level, but internationally. 4/x

In all of this, beware hindsight bias. Proper inquiry work is similar to that of an historian: You must examine decisions at the time they were made by people living in that moment who did not know what came next. 5/x

Done well, inquiries into what happened, why, and how we can do better will be extremely painstaking and complex. And time-consuming. Even after the pandemic ends, this will take years. If Twitter hot takes are one extreme on the spectrum of inquiry, this is the other. 6/x

A thought about Wimbledon: Rolling over the same insurance policy year after year is a lot easier (thank you, status quo bias) than justifying pandemic insurance year after year. So it may be very significant that pandemic insurance was a clause within an existing policy. 7/x

Following on that: How else can we make it easier for leaders to overcome politics and maintain preparedness absent a feeling of threat? This should be a big part of any inquiry. 8/x

Stray thought: Should national security be recast? Pandemics are as much a threat to nations as foreign invasion. Funding for both types of preparedness comes from the same purse. Would this dilute focus or lead to a more rational and effective allocation of resources? 9/x

Lastly, partisanship: All the preceding assumes we want to learn from experience and do better in future. That will not happen if partisanship turns everything into a giant exercise in motivated reasoning. Everybody check your partisan swords at the door, please. 10/x

Sorry, last last tweet: this long ramble is following on an op-Ed I published in the Globe this morning: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-pandemics-are-low-probability-high-consequence-events-we-should-have/