Notwithstanding the unprecedented advancement in information and technology, in research and development across all areas, especially in health and virology, the world has been caught squarely off guard by the COVID-19, or coronavirus pandemic.

As soon as we get past the frenetic efforts now underway to contain and control the spread of the disease, the big question that mankind will have to seek to answer is what explains the stunning level of unpreparedness for the COVID-19 disease?

Pandemics have been among the most brutal killers in human history, some of the more devastating ones being cholera, the bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza, all of which have claimed untold millions of lives but have since been conquered, or at least no longer pose the terror of past ages.

We suggest that among the reasons for the lack of preparedness is complacency based on the perception that nothing short of nuclear disaster could destroy the world, and even then there are bunkers in which some people, likely an elite, could survive.

Complacency, we argue, must be among the dominant factors because the devastation wrought by several pandemics and outbreaks is still fresh in human memory, as the majority of the world’s population lived through them.

The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) pandemic made its presence felt in 1981, with an estimated 40 million people still living with the human immunodeficiency virus which causes AIDS.

The H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic reared its head between 2009 and 2010, in one year infecting as many as 1.4 billion people across the globe and killing between 151,700 and 575,400 people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The Ebola epidemic ravaged West Africa between 2014 and 2016, with 28,600 reported cases and 11,325 deaths. The bulk of the cases and deaths occurred in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, with a smaller number of cases in Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, the United States, and Europe, according to the CDC.

Interestingly, former Republican President George W Bush is enjoying a new round of respect following the publication last weekend of a report detailing his efforts as president to prepare the United States for a viral outbreak.

The then leader of the free world is quoted by the ABC network as saying in 2005: “If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today.”

His plan is being dusted off and presented against the backdrop of the coronavirus which,,at Jamaica Observer press time, had taken 82,000 lives and sickened 1.4 million people.

According to ABC, after reading a gripping book on the 1918 flu pandemic in 2005, President Bush immediately directed members of his Administration to make plans to prepare for such pandemics.

Out of that was born “the nation’s most comprehensive pandemic plan — a playbook that included diagrams for a global early warning system, funding to develop new, rapid vaccine technology, and a robust national stockpile of critical supplies, such as face masks and ventilators… ” said ABC.

So, again the question: Why were we so unprepared for COVID-19?