Taming COVID-19 by Regulation: An Opportunity for Self-Reflection

The COVID-19 outbreak is not the first nor last series of recent real or potential catastrophes - be they natural disasters, terrorist attacks or pandemics - that have taken by surprise governments, globalised firms and the citizenry. 1Yet, due to its near-unprecedented impact on the highly interconnected but vulnerable systems that define the modern world, this pandemic has been testing our ability to govern risk more than any other crisis before. The last time the world responded to a global emerging disease epidemic of the scale of the current novel coronavirus without having access to vaccines was the 1918-1919 H1N1 influenza pandemic. 2Ironically, the measures mobilised today to counter COVID-19 - the so-called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” 3- are essentially the same as those deployed a century ago, and that despite significant social, technological as well as governance differences between 1918 and today. 4