The Art of Changing Course

CHAPTER 9Real‐World Application

The COVID‐19 pandemic has taken the lives of millions of people and unarguably caused mass hysteria, distress, and turmoil financially, physically, and emotionally. But pandemics are not a modern‐day phenomenon. The term “pandemic” was coined in 1666, but pandemics can be traced back as far as 430 BCE from the Athenian Plague to the Black Death in 1346 CE to the Spanish flu in 1918. Add on HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and SARS, and you see that history naturally has experienced pandemics not as a rarity but as a natural phenomenon. All pandemics can lead to both short‐term and long‐term economic harm.

The similarities or normalities of pandemics are what is most fascinating. Our most recent pandemic being the last widespread and rapidly spreading virus was the first pandemic of its kind after antibiotic discovery in the 1940s. Even with our medical advancements since then, the process and reactions to pandemics were comparable from the black plague to the Spanish flu all the way through COVID‐19.

Scapegoating (i.e. finding someone or something to blame) is seen with almost all pandemics. During the cholera outbreak in the 1800s, riots happened because people believed “elites with physicians as their agents had invented the disease to cull populations of the poor” (Cohn 2018). During the same outbreak, in Russia, physicians were blamed for poisoning the wells, resulting in the targeting of medical staff. During the SARS pandemic, the Chinese accused Westerners ...