Major Read: What the experts get wrong about pandemics, then and ahead

I

“We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us.” Truth told, I’m a bit sour hearing public health experts repeat this continuously.

So I relish my own “I told you so!” back at them. “I’m now telling you you’ve been talking to the wrong people all along!”

II

It’s clear that the people who should have been informed about the dangers of a pandemic were not among the people addressed by experts. I have in mind the professionals who operate our real-time critical infrastructures, like water, electricity, telecommunications and transportation. No one told those men and women in the control rooms and out in the field that COVID-19 would wreak such havoc as it did in systems mandated to be so reliable.

From our interviews in Oregon and Washington State, it’s obvious no one predicted the actual, mega-impacts and interruptions that COVID has had on the real-time operations of core infrastructures, there or beyond. You probably already know essential workers were sent home to work offsite. Arguably less known is that those on-site had to get vaccinated, and some very experienced personnel left as a result. Far less appreciated, COVID put a brake on major infrastructure investment, improvement and management activities. Said one logistic manager of his state’s response, “All [COVID-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this.”

“COVID was a wake-up call,” we were told, again and again, by our interviewees, not something you’d expect to hear had the case actually been: “We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us!”

III

So what? We wouldn’t have an economy, we wouldn’t have markets, if it weren’t for electricity, water, telecoms and transportation being reliable. Yet to my knowledge the professionals responsible for real-time operations in the infrastructures were never specifically warned and were never specifically talked to by the pandemic experts.

So: Pandemic experts, the next time around–and yes I agree there will be a next time–it’s you who are going to fail because those who didn’t hear were those you didn’t care to know, let alone talk to. Your duty of care is to talk to the right people.