> The global response to Covid-19 is much better than could reasonably have been expected before the event.

We're going to have to disagree on that. I read a couple of books on the subject pre-pandemic and I thought we were in good shape because the science was well understood. I had not calculated in politics, my bad.

> We don't have 10% of the world's population dead, collapsed major cities due to core services failing, or any disasters at similar scale, and a raging pandemic with 20 or more virulent variants sweeping through repeatedly.

Well, this is where some hindsight would come in handy, but for that we'll have to wait until this is all over, which so far it isn't. And this is exactly the kind of thinking which makes me believe strongly that we will not be able to effectively address climate change. It takes place on a time scale too slow for people to give a care. The things we're good at are earthquakes, storms, volcanic eruptions and floodings: they are there, immediately and you can do something about it using emergency response. The kind of problem that would effectively require 8 billion people to cooperate for a change is something that we simply have not mastered and my never master.

But thank you for illustrating my point in a very effective way.

I think it's completely fair to say that the death toll from COVID could have been much lower up to this point, and it also could have been much higher. In spite of the political divides, there was a lot of collective action across the globe to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, and I wish people wouldn't dismiss that for the sake of cynicism.

Fair enough. I was - still am - in the act early and decisively camp, and got shouted down by the people who felt that that would affect their preferred lifestyle too much and it still grates. But you have a good point, it could have been much worse. At the same time: this isn't over yet and it may still get much worse, we are still at 2/3rds of the peak more and more nasty strains of the virus keep popping up.

When a virus jumps species there is a chance that it will evolve into more benign species over time, unfortunately COVID seems to be going in the other direction, it is getting better at infecting us and doing more damage to allow itself to spread better. And our slow-walking of counter measures has created an ideal environment with just enough selection pressure to evolve some even nastier strains.

On a global scale this is far from over, and there is a very good chance that the places that are now breathing a sigh of relief are going to be hit hard by later waves of more dangerous versions of this virus.

So 'mitigate' is a word that is best used retrospectively.