Yeah, my first though: so this is how Q2 2020 is going to start. Will we even get to Q3, or will the gods cancel humanity mid-season because of low ratings?

In norwegian we have an expression: En ulykke kommer sjelden alene. A misfortune/accident seldom comes alone.

I’ve heard it said in California as “When it rains, it pours”

Think it's a common saying in English the language, in general. Heard it lots from people around the world.

It has fallen into disuse in Seattle.

Just remove the "when" bit.

Definitely say that here (Alberta, Canada).

From Shakespeare's Hamlet: "When sorrows come, they come not single spies But in battalions"

German version is basically the same even without translating: Ein Unglück kommt selten allein.

In Dutch it's "een ongeluk komt zelden alleen"

Also, “bad things come in threes”

Is this number three?

The virus seems to have triggered the pending recession, so if it does blow - yep, seems like it.

yeah we're pattern seeking machines... its no surprise that we lump events together like that.

To me, this is the scariest aspect of a fast&hot pandemic. If hospitals are already overloaded, supplies already exhausted, what happens in the event of a significant natural disaster? Typically, nations around the world rally to assist with hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami, etc. What would that look like today?

Black swan events extreme enough to push our normal operating infrastructure to the limit are very hard to prepare for efficiently and effectively. Preparing for them to double up is likely a fool's errand. This is obviously cold comfort if we have an extinction level event on the heels of a pandemic, but at some point you have to just accept your fate.

  Till shade is gone,
  Till water is gone,
  Into the shadow with teeth bared,
  Screaming defiance with the last breath,
  To spit in Sightblinder's eye on the last day.

I suppose the Mark Watney "Keep solving problems" is more in keeping with the HN zeitgeist. Ah well.

I'm not worried about extinction-level events -- more like the 100-year earthquakes and hurricanes that are improbable in any one place but somewhat frequent on a global scale... things like hurricane Katrina

Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?

Even brief nuclear winter would cause billion of deaths from starvation (and chaos caused by collapsing economy).

I just wonder if we have a plan B to rebuild stuff (relatively) quickly or humans will be thrown into preindustrial world condemned to reinvent everything again?

"Is there any guide or plan how to rebuild from such a catastrophe?"

There's a ton of them. You can google "prepper community".

IMHO all of them tend to underestimate the cleverness of the remaining humans; i.e., holing up in a cabin in the mountains with a metric ton of freezedried food won't help when you've got people with a metric ton of freezedried motivation to find you.

It doesn't matter how much planning you do; such plans would not survive contact with the enemy anyhow.

I stick to the regular amounts of prep I've been advising anyhow. It helps even if such a worst-case occurs and gives you time to plan your next move, which is all you can really ask for anyhow.

To close out on a happier note, it isn't even all bad news, and it may be getting better over time. Even a catastrophic collapse of civilization could still leave you with a lot more resources than you'd expect, as society gets wealthier over time. For instance, every house that has solar panels on it is just a few components away from being able to provide small, but potentially vital, amounts of power, power that will have all sorts of uses. It may not be fun but people may surprise you with what even the "shattered remnants" of civilization can do. After all, we bootstrapped once already with none of that stuff.

Plans A-Z call for us avoiding all nuclear winters and impacts from large asteroids. We don’t and won’t ever have a way to quickly rebuild after extinction level events. It will affect multiple generations in the best case.

If society was actually thrown back into preindustrial levels, odds are good we would never get back, because all of the easy to acquire oil/coal is already gone.

The world just got caught completely flat footed by a virus that's closely related to the seasonal flu. I shudder to think what will happen when something 1000 times more novel and deadly inevitably comes along.

Depends on your definition of "deadly".

The MERS virus was much more deadly than this thing, and that wasn't very long ago. The problem with it was that it was too deadly: it killed people off pretty quickly. Pathogens that are highly deadly usually aren't very good at starting plagues, because they kill off their hosts too quickly and for that reason don't spread that much. This one is worse because it has a really long incubation period with few or no symptoms and then does its thing, but still with a relatively low mortality rate.

I guess what would really cause civilization to collapse would be a virus that has a very long incubation time with no symptoms, and then sudden very high mortality.

I mean, that's kind of what HIV was up until the mid-late 90s anyway. No symptoms for years and then nearly 100% mortality.

It's killed millions but still hasn't wiped out civilization.

HIV didn't spread very quickly because it required fluid transfer (and usually sexual, even kissing generally didn't spread it). It's hard to have an "outbreak" when a virus is so difficult to spread between people.

There are not plans for such an event.

Such plans are inherently unpalletable.

The right answer would be murder 90% of the population to sustain the resources for the 10% during the recovery.

How many people are game for that?

Well you probably don’t need a whole 10% to murder the other 90%.

My point is... If you have enough foodstore for X% of the population to make it through the 5-10 year period of crop failure, but can't do that if you try to feed 100% of the people what do you do?

I choose the 10% and continuity of civilization over 100% and complete destruction of society. And if I'm in the 90% .... I'll be pissed, but what needs to be done must be done.

In WW2 sailors sealed themselves up below the waterline to save the ship at certain doom to themselves.

The universe is an ugly place... But to see the light of humanity possibly extinguished is a worse prospect for me personally.

Whatever hope we had of surviving a nuclear winter now was gone the moment the virus shot the global supply chains to hell.

The supply chains are back. China has made big progress and are back to work.

They're not back yet. The back end is pumping goods again, but the receiving side is crashing, sending demand shock waves upstream.

There's a bit of a gap between "shit" and literal apocalypse.

Good news.

A civilization ending asteroid is going to miss us! https://www.space.com/asteroid-1998-or2-earth-flyby-april-20...

Will we be able to get toilet paper in this nuclear winter?

Finally an end to the climate crisis!

All it takes is wiping out humanity! Who knew?