It was the only such event in most people's lifetimes.

We've had, in this century, SARS, swine flu, MERS, ebola (× like 4), mpox (×2 apparently), Zika virus, and COVID-19. AIDS is a pandemic that's been going on since before I was born.

Pandemics and pandemic scares are really friggin' common.

Several of those were not pandemics (I assume this is why you used the phrase "pandemic scares" as a catch-all).

Regardless of official classification, I don't recall any of them having anywhere near the same global impact as COVID.

How many of those resulted in worldwide lockdowns, masking mandates, and widespread testing requirements for travel? I believe the answer is: 1.

This is a very pedantic counter argument that leans on the fact that "pandemic" has too broad of a definition. There was nothing else like COVID in my (40 year) lifetime.

Half of them have, actually. The COVID response was heavily based off of the SARS response. The major difference with COVID is that it's the first time first world countries were asked to employ standard public health responses in many decades.

> The major difference with COVID is […]

Those are, obviously to me as a different reader, the entire point.

These are not mutually exclusive properties. Pandemic modellers do not predict exactly when a pandemic will emerge, they predict how a pandemic will evolve once it emerges. The actual emergence of a pandemic is still about as predictable as, say, a stock market crash or a war.

The virulence and adaptability of Covid makes it very much a black swan.

A black swan is something you didn't even imagine before encountering it. If you never imagined anything like COVID that's likely because your day job is unrelated to health emergency preparedness.

I've imagined things far worse than covid my friend. I write sci-fi and horror. Other people's "black swans" are my evening wind-down exercise. Just because I've seen some shit doesn't mean that when it tears through the world and it's new to y'all it won't be a black swan.

+ N. Taleb many time said covid is NOT a black swan. By definition.

Trump fired many people whose job it was to plan for it. RFK Jr canceled vaccine research and various practices that will make it worse. I never imagined such idiocy on top of Trump's more likely racism policies. Future pandemics are much more likely now.

Then almost anything is not a black swan by this logic.

Russian invasion is not a black swan event, we had many of them before and there are people whose day job is to plan for them.

Tsunami, earthquake are another examples. We had them before and there are plans for such events.