a viral shot across the bow for humanity
to me, this viral outbreak, while neither harmless nor under control, is remarkable in its status as a warning event.
don't get me wrong, we still need to deal with it, and it's causing very real damage.
however awful it is now, the next outbreak could easily be worse -- equally transmittable and twice as fatal. so what are we going to do about it? clearly what humans have now won't cut it. some segments of humanity did okay, but overall this has been a huge bungle. going to closed-border nation-states and indigenous cave tribes seems unlikely, so global travel will remain a thing. well, that's actually helpful, imho, as we need to be capable of planetary-scale cooperation going forward.
and this represents a normal homegrown natural threat, perhaps artificially aggravated by loosely-controlled "wet markets", but naturally occurring nonetheless and of a kind similar to those we've faced previously in our species' development.
if we can't handle this kind of crisis smoothly, how the hell are we going to manage habitat reduction due to global warming? Yellowstone super-volcano blowout? how about giant meteor? like it or not, there are big disasters pending in the cache. this seems to me like nature's firmly urgent wake-up call compared to the incredible difficulties queued up for humanity to face.
it seems to me that this virus exposes the folly of nationalism, especially the weak quasi-nationalism we've been using to enable late-stage capitalists to plunder the globe. we need planetary oversight of some kind, forget the Space Force, we need an Earth Force.