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COVID dwarfs five famous disasters
The numbers
Together, Surfside, the 737 MAX, Katrina, Fukushima, and Challenger come to about 5,000 deaths and 349 billion dollars. COVID-19 caused 15 million deaths and cost the globe 45 trillion dollars. Every plane accident, hurricane, nuclear accident, building collapse, and space accident added together still gets only a third of the way to COVID.
The smaller disasters
Each of the smaller disasters drew a purposeful investigation. Katrina and the 737 MAX had bipartisan congressional committees, Feynman and Kurokawa led standalone inquiries, NIST and the National Science Foundation launched investigations, and the Miami Herald staffed up to thirty-seven people on Surfside. Seventeen victim lawsuits at Surfside were put under a single class.
What COVID lacked
COVID drew none of that. There was no newsroom with more than thirty investigators, no bipartisan Senate and House committees, and no standalone investigation led by someone like Feynman or Kurokawa. The NIH did not fund a third-party investigation, and no massive victims' lawsuit was filed. Six years later, the root cause is still unknown.
Why do plane crashes always get investigated?
In the United States, Congress gave the National Transportation Safety Board the legal duty to investigate every civil aviation accident. Founded in 1967, the board has no power to regulate, which keeps its findings separate from the agency that sets the rules. Internationally, a treaty annex from the International Civil Aviation Organization sets out who must investigate and who may take part. The board has issued well over ten thousand safety recommendations since it began.
How are pandemic origins usually traced?
Investigators sample animals and people from the earliest outbreak and compare the virus's genetic sequences. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, researchers found closely related viruses in masked palm civets sold in live-animal markets in Guangdong, China. MERS, first identified in 2012, was later linked to dromedary camels on the Arabian Peninsula. HIV's origins in chimpanzee viruses in central Africa took decades of genetic work to establish.
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