Before the coronavirus crisis, Michael Osterholm , a renowned professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, pictured a fictional pandemic scenario.
One of the earliest casualties, Osterholm predicted in his book Deadliest Enemy (co-written with Mark Olshaker), would be the global just-in-time business model. “If a factory in China suddenly can’t function because 30 or 40 per cent of its workforce is sick, we don’t have a stockpile of its goods . . . to tide us over until the factory reopens,” he wrote. Similar outbreaks “in enough places at the same time” would render factories unable to source parts and supplies, sparking “a domino effect in which world trade suffers and economies start to falter”. Before long, Osterholm had spun a dystopian vision in which countries battle each other for N95 masks, doctors ration ventilators and unemployment hits levels that make the Great Depression look like a pothole.
Deadliest Enemy was first published in the US in 2017; now an updated version is being released in the UK. Today’s real-life pandemic is exactly the right time to reprise his ideas, even if he mistakenly fictionalised the culprit as influenza (as did governments in their preparedness plans) rather than a coronavirus.