Covid-19 is a new kind of pandemic

Throughout history the normal route for a highly infectious viral disease was always outbreak-epidemic-pandemic. The 2009 Swine Flu pandemic was the first to illustrate that it was now possible to as much leapfrog the epidemic stage and go from the outbreak stage to the pandemic stage in a matter of days or even hours. 

How could this happen? A number of factors arose and converged near the end of the last century that made it possible:

> megapopulations
> urbanized societies all over the world
> megacities 
 > huge numbers of jumbo commercial jets
> huge numbers of international airports built all around the world
>huge numbers of domestic airports built 
> cheap international and domestic airfares
> virtually unrestricted air travel between most countries
> huge numbers of air travelers crisscrossing the globe on a daily basis.  

Then it only needed the right kind of virus and the right time of year, as happened with the 2009 Swine Flu, to make a new kind of pandemic. A virus no longer needed to bother with a time-consuming spread from one country to another. It could be deposited all around the world at almost the same time, then start its exponential march once inside the countries, boosted by extensive domestic air travel.

Covid-19 is just a slap on the wrist, and yet the havoc it's caused in a mere 14 weeks can be read as the last warning in a string of warnings starting with the AIDS pandemic.

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