Over the past 15 years, there has been no shortage of articles and white papers issuing dire warnings that a global pandemic involving a new respiratory disease was only a matter of time. There was little special about my insight.

The magazine cover read: “Warning: the world is not ready for another pandemic”. In October 2019, I attended a simulation involving a fictional pandemic, caused by a novel coronavirus, that killed 65 million people, and in the spring of 2017 I wrote a feature story for TIME magazine on the subject. From my own reporting, I knew this first-hand. The novel coronavirus pandemic, known as Covid-19, could not have been more predictable.