Predicting the next catastrophe won’t help us

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Paid Post The power of PayPal online, now in person. Give your small business an easy way to accept touch-free, in-person payments. Create a unique QR code with the PayPal app and display it on your device or as a printout in store. [Download the app.]( Customer must have PayPal account and app to pay. PayPal [The Next Global Disaster Is On Its Way, and We Aren’t Ready]( — Niall Ferguson The Covid-19 pandemic is not over, but it is already clear that Lord Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, has won his [2017 bet]( with the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker that “bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than Dec. 31, 2020.” Last year, according to [Johns Hopkins University](, the SARS-CoV-2 virus claimed the lives of 1.8 million people. The global death toll could exceed [5 million]( by Aug. 1 — or [9 million](, if one accepts the drastic new upward revision by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. It could have been worse, of course. In March 2020, some [epidemiologists argued]( that, without drastic social distancing and economic lockdowns, the ultimate death toll could be between 30 million and 40 million. Yet the cost of such [nonpharmaceutical interventions]( has been enormous — for the U.S. alone, an estimated [90% of GDP](. Lord Rees’s was only one of many warnings before 2020 that humanity’s most clear and present danger was a new pathogen and the global pandemic it could cause. Yet somehow these warnings did not translate into swift, effective action in most countries when a pandemic struck. Why did so many democracies handle this crisis so badly? Read the [whole thing](. [The Personality Traits That Make Lockdown Coping Easier]( — Andreas Kluth [A Baby Boom Would Be Bad]( — Amanda Little [Markets Are In for an Interest-Rate Surprise]( — Bill Dudley [A New Global Monetary Order Threatens the Dollar]( — Jim Bianco Trump Isn’t the Biggest Republican Threat]( — Jonathan Bernstein U.K. Travel List Helps Portugal, Hurts Spain, Greece and Italy]( — Andrea Felsted [The Hertz Gamblers Were Right]( — Matt Levine [Miami as a Tech Hub? It’s Lacking One Critical Subculture]( — Tyler Cowen [Dogecoin May Be a Hustle, But It’s the People’s Hustle]( — Tim Culpan This is the Weekend Edition of Bloomberg Opinion Today, a roundup of the most popular stories Bloomberg Opinion published this week based on web readership.  Like Bloomberg Opinion Today? [Subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more](. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](.  You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022