COVID-19: A semi-novel risk emerges into the human domain In the last quarter of 2019, a semi-novel risk entered the human biological ecosystem, and simultaneously, the human public policy ecosystem. That semi-novel risk was COVID-19, a previously unknown variant of coronavirus capable of infecting, sickening, and killing otherwise healthy human beings. 1 In late 2019 COVID-19 began to spread through the Earth’s human population from its origination point somewhere in the vicinity of the city of Wuhan, China.

To say that the reaction of the human policy ecosystem to the risk of COVID-19 was both extreme, haphazard, and historically unprecedented would be an understatement. Actions proposed, promoted, mandated, and enforced to modify the risks posed by COVID-19 to individuals and to society as a whole were orders of magnitude more intrusive than any other risk-intervention policies ever promoted, proposed, or implemented by governments in the past. This was a truly radical, global intervention by governments to control a novel biological risk.