Air travel increase is a big factor why it got so bad so quickly, even in the past two decades basically everything has changed. We have hundreds millions of people basically teleporting between continents every day.
That's hyperbole. In 2019 there were 4.5 billion passengers boarding a flight[1]. Divide by 365 days and you get on the order of 10 million per day, most of which will not be intercontinental.
I don't disagree about the amount of air travel nowadays facilitating pandemics, just wanted to get the numbers straight.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...
You’re implying as if wars happen because people are all angry and if they just happened to be kinder then all of that would be resolved immediately.
It’s discounting a bunch of pragmatic reasons a lot of which have nothing to do with philosophy or human condition.
>> and prepared for one happening eventually
Which is what you're doing - because the context of the thread is more specifically that anyone foresaw it - 'He couldn’t foresee that. No one did.' and the person I'm replied to that saying that they thought just some like Taiwan foresaw it.
Both are demonstrably false claims - you can look at public national security risk registers to confirm to yourself that many other countries foresaw it.
But I think so did every country.
Wasn't global pandemic at the top of almost every country's national security risk register? They knew it was likely, and they knew it was high-risk. I know for a fact it was at the top of the UK's public national security risk register.
You're perpetuating a silly myth that major western countries didn't know this was coming and didn't know it was a big risk.