Although some say COVID-19 is a black swan event, it really is not. Pandemics have occurred in the recent as well as the remote past.

A clearly articulated description of pandemic risk can be found in the World Economic Forum’s, The Global Risks Report 2019. “The spread of infectious disease‒ was among the top 10 risks listed, based on impact.

There are estimates of the cost of a pandemic in one of the special chapters in the report, though these may look small compared with what COVID-19 might actually cost.

In the The Global Risk Report for 2020, “infectious diseases‒ is again among the top 10 risks.

That report describes the readiness of countries to deal with epidemic or pandemic and cites a Nuclear Threat Initiative study that concluded that “no country is fully prepared to handle an epidemic or pandemic.‒