COVID Killed 3,000 Times More People Than Five Disasters Combined
It also cost about 130 times as much, yet Gurley says it never got the investigation the smaller disasters received.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Bill Gurley: Searching for FeynmanCOVID killed 15 million people, 3,000 times the 5,000 deaths from five earlier disasters combined, and cost $45 trillion, about 130 times their $349 billion cost.
That math comes from legendary investor Bill Gurley, the backer of Uber and Zillow, who added up a condo collapse, two jet crashes, a hurricane, a nuclear meltdown, and a shuttle explosion.
He said each of the smaller disasters got a full search for why it happened, with federal probes, newsroom teams, and victims lawsuits that he says produced fixes. Six years later, Gurley said, COVID still has no known root cause.
There was no committed newsroom with over 30 investigators, no bipartisan congressional committees, no standalone investigator, no science-funded investigation with NIH funding a third-party probe, and no massive victims lawsuit. He recalled Richard Feynman, the Caltech professor who investigated the shuttle explosion, answering someone who told him to be nicer: "But seven people died."
Questions people ask
What were the five smaller disasters in the comparison?
They were the 2021 Surfside condo collapse in Florida, the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan, and the Challenger shuttle explosion. Together Gurley put them at 5,000 deaths and $349 billion in damage.
Did those investigations actually prevent future harm?
Gurley argues they led to concrete prevention. Florida rewrote its condominium inspection rules after Surfside, New Orleans built about $15 billion in seawalls that have held for 20 years, and air safety and nuclear rules were tightened. His point is that finding root cause is how future deaths are avoided.
Does no known root cause mean there are no theories?
No. Scientists still debate a natural animal spillover versus a laboratory accident, and China tested about 80,000 animals without finding a crossover. Gurley says the problem is not lack of theories but lack of the kind of independent, well funded inquiry given to far smaller disasters.