>What is there to learn?

Lots actually. Just like Edision found 999 ways not to make a light bulb. We also learned (re-learned) that common sense is not so common, and that people are just really not into being told what to do.

>Events like this are rare enough

Things that used to be "rare" are occurring more frequently to be considered "rare". Maybe more into the area of "uncommon". The Texas grid example is something so stupid to have allowed to happen after it just happend 10 years prior and with a simple (yet expensive-ish) solution. COVID-19 has had warnings of its level of spread for years with SARS, bird flus, etc. Those in charge of disaster prevention/recovery have failed us.

You are arguing ethics, I am arguing motivation. Disaster strikes, some mitigation is put in place, but then it's a long time till the next one. Which means plenty of time for enterprising opportunists to redirect the resources somewhere else because nobody really cares while times are good.

There won't be any lessons learned because in 20 years there will be a more pressing need for something else, and slashing funds for pandemic prevention will be a quick way to win some votes. This pattern will never stop repeating because it can't.

> COVID-19 has had warnings of its level of spread for years with SARS, bird flus, etc.

To me this was all "boy who cried wolf" stuff. I certainly remember media fear porn about SARS, about the expected severity of the next upcoming flu season, etc. It never amounted to anything significant in reality.

But here we are with COVID-19. Each of those flus were slightly worse than the previous leading up to where we are now. It's not that the scientists/doctors were wrong to make the warnings. Similar in how NWS is not wrong to issue Severe Weather warnings as frequently as they do. All it takes is the one time to have had advance warning and to not use it.

We just lived through two timelines. SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, which was successfully controlled, and SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, which wasn't.

COVID has caused three million deaths and counting, with widespread disruption to society. How could you look at that and say the reaction in 2003 was overstated?

You skipped right over the avian and swine flu pandemics, which weren't controlled and evidently barely registered.

Also, the widespread disruption to society has virtually all been from the lockdowns, not the pandemic.

Are they rare enough? SARS wasn't that many years ago and was caught before becoming a pandemic, but that certainly wasn't a guarantee. Huge disease pandemics aren't black swans. They are common events throughout pretty much all human history.

Neither extrem weather events, nor pandemics are expected to be freak events in the coming years. SARS1 was a warning shot.

I don't think pandemic monitoring and response preparation are a that expensive, even if you use them just once a decade or two.

And lots of failings highlighted by the pandemic are of a general nature concerning infrastructure debt. If health care wasn't run at max human capacity for "cost effectiveness" we may not have to talk about triage. If broadband internet access and digital literacy were a thing, WFH would run more smoothly.

Nature has its ways of managing unsustainable population growth. Basically, starvation or disease. Maybe humanity is just at that point, and there's not a lot we can do absent some really breaking changes to how we live, work, and produce what we need.

Sure there's a lot to be learned.

Even something as basic as having a national stockpile again, learning that we should have a decent manufacturing base for these kinds of critical items, and all the lessons about how to communicate with the public regarding health recommendations. There's plenty to be learned.

One thing we should learn and should have already known before the pandemic is that public health officials shouldn't be deliberately lying to the public. Unfortunately, Fauci has no remorse and hasn't apologized. He thinks he did the right thing which is a huge problem.

Another thing is that we should have more explicit goals. Fauci is still not giving an explicit answer and pretty much just says that we'll just know when to go back to normal. Then they wonder why there is vaccine hesitancy.

Feasible solutions are better than perfect solutions

The Ebola outbreak should have primed us for this.