Managers emphasized low costs over resilience. Innovation and productivity gains have slowed in recent decades, and technological advances focused on retail, entertainment and blockbuster drugs rather than basics like vaccines or manufacturing. “A once-healthy innovation ecosystem in the US, capable of identifying and creating technologies essential to the country’s welfare, has been eroding for decades.” Government funding and policies shape innovation, but the US trusted free markets and entrepreneurs while neglecting government investment in science, research and development for manufacturing or infrastructure capability for basic supplies. “In an age of big data in which companies like Google and Amazon use all sorts of personal information for their advertising and shopping operations, health authorities were making decisions blind,” reports David Rotman for MIT Technology Review. Muddled communications, slow development of tests, fragmented data collection systems and equipment shortages compounded the spread.

The world received early warnings about Covid-19’s high transmission and mortality rates in early January, weeks before the disease took beyond China where it originated.

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