2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless.
- Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.
- Covid also underlined "the power of information technology", as hundreds of millions of people shifted to an online world in a matter of weeks, notwithstanding all its deleterious effects on society.
- Covid has also shown the incredible resiliency we have built into our Food Supply through the Automation of Agriculture. "While in 1349 an average farmhand reaped about 5 bushels per day, in 2014 a combine set a record by harvesting 30,000 bushels in a day.
Consequently Covid-19 had no significant impact on global production of staple crops such as wheat, maize and rice.
- In turn, Covid showed global trade could go on functioning more or less smoothly because it involved very few humans.
A largely automated present-day container ship can carry more tons than the merchant fleet of an entire early modern kingdom. In 1582, the English merchant fleet had a total carrying capacity of 68,000 tons and required about 16,000 sailors. The container ship OOCL Hong Kong, christened in 2017, can carry some 200,000 tons while requiring a crew of only 22.
Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions, says Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times.
Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid
In a year of scientific breakthroughs — and political failures — what can we learn for the future?
How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective?
