What's going to happen?

The UK is now projected to be the country worst affected European by COVID-19, in terms of cases and deaths. Thought I'd collect some of the best answers to that question I've seen recently, before I forget. How did Britain get its response to coronavirus so wrong? PARLIAMENT PPE PLEA - NHS Message To Government - Led By Donkeys Sorry, this one's behind an evil pay-wall, but you may be able to get free access Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster

Neil Ferguson had better be prepared. 20,000 deaths, not 510,000. Just like Y2K really.  Back in the '90s, it became clear that computer systems built in the 1980s and before, and never expected to be in use for so long, would be unable to function. Payroll systems would collapse, invoices go unpaid, programmable microcontrollers in dams, power stations, chemical plants go awry. Almost none of this happened. After the year passed peacefully, the siren voices began. Look at all those highly paid computer consultants we paid through the nose for the Y2K work they said. Like COVID-19, we'll never know what would have happened if we ignored Y2K. We chose not to run the experiment, see what happened if large numbers of computer systems failed at the same time. (I spotted one for instance myself. I was engaged on a team to rejig an early '90s system for an asset manager. A few weeks in I told them I'd run an experiment myself and found that on Tuesday the...

Many things should change, but when COVID-19 is a memory of a distant nightmare I wonder will we just go back to where we were. I think of our civilisation as in an adolescent phase of development. Many aspects that show tremendous promise, but also many paths to self-destruction with no clear signs we will avoid them. We're only a couple of hundred years old, a blink of an eye in the timescale of life on Earth. I love flying, I still think of getting on a big plane as something exciting, not at all routine. But if we let the air transport industry continue with unfettered expansion, it will soon become one of our biggest carbon emitters. We should find a way, globally, to restrict fossil-fuelled aircraft to necessary travel - journeys that must happen and are not practical any other way, maybe one long-haul trip a year per rich Westerner. That will have a negative impact on some people I admire. If we don't, future generations will face problems much worse than COVID--19. htt...

Local businesses have been praised in the crisis, butchers, bakers and corner shops providing vital supplies and delivery services to the vulnerable in their own communities. How often have we heard complaints about giant supermarket chains - often out-of-town, accessible only by car - obliterating businesses like these by offering almost everything to almost everybody, self-service and at a very nice price? We can't have it both ways. Covid-19 won't happen every year - it is to be hoped - but how much worse could it have been if the major supermarket chains could not scale up and local businesses were just not there any more. Local  shops can sometimes find a niche to protect themselves in competition with the giants, but it is a rare thing and many local butchers and bakers are just more boarded-up premises on the village high-street. If we want this fixed, want to protect this local resilience, it will not happen without policy and eventually law. Free market forces ...