I’ve been thinking about how interesting it is that I never - in 10 years of horizon-scanning & programming the world’s foremost experts, campaigners, thought leaders, academics and futurists to speak @RSAEvents -heard anything *close* to this scenario predicted or discussed. 1/7

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, yes. Caring for an ageing population, yes. A thousand other pressing and still potentially catastrophic problems ahead and already here (hello climate change) we addressed in depth. But this - even with the SARS canary tweeting - didn’t come up 2/7

This is a personal failure of course - epidemiologists (and Bill Gates) have clearly been talking about this, and somehow my radar was off. But nothing about the possibility of a global virus reached the ‘urgent’ level of public discussion. It seemed one of many 3/7

potential, alarming bad futures bunched together with a lot of other remote and hard-to-imagine possibilities. If anything, dystopian teen fiction seems to have foreshadowed this scenario more than anything I saw in publisher’s catalogues or ‘smart thinking’ periodicals. 4/7

However, one thing that DID come up, over and over again, was that starving public services like the NHS of essential resources was dangerous. Many economists of different stripes warned that austerity was counter-productive. That welfare needed to be reimagined. 5/7

That inequality caused dramatically different health outcomes. The more I think about it, the more I see that the world’s public intellectuals *have* pointed out the systemic failures we’re seeing now - so many times - just not against this specific backdrop. 6/7

So for me, it’s a really odd feeling of professional radar failure - ‘how did we not see this coming?!’ with a sad, sharp twist of ‘WE REALLY SAW THIS COMING’. 7/7

Also, follow and subscribe to the @RSAEvents mailing list - there’s an excellent series of online events about COVID coming up, alongside a huge back catalogue of YT vids and thoughtful animations to keep you going through quarantine (some good ones for home school too)