I think this is called the Design Margin. One of the dangers inherent in spending multi-trillions on solar panels and windmills to fend off a threat a model predicts is that it leaves nothing over to meet the unexpected.
We are actually in the same position as Gamelin. The main enemy is Greenhouse gases. Right: export all the smokestacks to China! And while everyone is sitting on the climate change Dyle River the virus cuts right through Wuhan-on-the-Ardennes.
The threat should have come from the places marked on the Thunberg map. But sacre bleu! Now we are short a billion masks and the the factories are in China. C'est impossible.
All the mass transit, high density housing and public spaces -- which are good things in other times -- all our enlightened advantages are turned against us for now.
Of course humanity will survive, a little the worse for wear perhaps, but what will it have learned? Probably nothing. The main lesson of history is that nobody learns anything from history.
