Ten Takeaway Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Nitty-Gritty Version

Many Western countries abandoned traditional voluntarist methods of disease control, instead following in the footsteps of China’s pandemic response, which entailed a turn to authoritarian and coercive measures like lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

Because this sort of internationally coordinated, authoritarian response to a pandemic has no historical precedent, it can reasonably be viewed as one of the most high stakes social experiments of all time. We have seen the experiment play out: what can we learn from it? In this article, I outline ten lessons I have drawn from the international response to Covid-19.

(This is the “nitty gritty” version. Click here for the “quick and dirty” version of this article).

1. The emotional and cognitive salience of risk should not be confused with the objective gravity of risk.

It is normal that after the outbreak of a pandemic involving a novel pathogen, the threat of that specific pathogen is foremost on almost everyone’s minds. It is normal that in t…