The most salient feature of the ongoing crisis is the nearly hyper realistic reactions. Vast agglomerations of actors have acted more or less as expected. In the world of ideas, everything is just the same as ever. Many claim the existence of decisive new angles. Then admit that the crisis is about the same as crises usually are. Those afflicted most and least were bets placed at short odds. The different strategies from the state follow the template. The economic consequences are in some regards more predictable than previous financial crises. Like the never absent, sleepy nuancing, of the philosophical discourse. The usual economic analyses. Exactly like the last time, you should have bought gold and other focal assets. Oil is not that hot while the depression cools industry and the state chokes traffic – Bank of England insists on keeping tonnes of Venezuelan gold. Some shall continue to be treated as the plague itself. No one talks about this. Exactly as expected.
To become more concrete, 9/11 is frequently used as an example on how governments maintain coercive measures once implemented in time of crisis. Such analysis obfuscates. The modern surveillance system was launched before 9/11 for reasons concerning power and economics. Power takes the opportunity to reveal what it is already doing through legislature and flag-waving. More or less as usual.
There is great peril in this familiarity.
Both pandemics and pollution have intriguing similarities in terms of human behaviour and interaction. Underpinning the hazards of these, is the incongruence between individual actions and global outcomes. Your decision to go to the job while you are sick may be based on personal considerations alone, but the impact may be disastrous on a whole society. The same problem is present in the cost-benefit analysis of an individual firm which does not necessarily take into account its environmental impact. In short, both of these examples concerns a class of discrepancies between individual action and global outcomes which are called externalities.
For example, the renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky wrote a very thoughtful piece* about the political economy of Corona, where he outlined the failures of the current political and economic system to deal with negative externalities.
Nevertheless, it seems like the challenges during a pandemic are dream scenario compared to the destruction of the environment, at the fundamental level of information and feedback structure. Ordinary citizens have at least stronger incentives to follow regulations (e.g. in proactive European countries), because the information about personal costs is better, and the adverse effects more immediate.
No such natural alignment between personal and global outcomes exists in an unregulated global market, which conditions our current trajectory to an environmental disaster. Therefore, even if it we deal with the current crisis flawlessly from now on, it would still reveal very little about our capacity to deal with one of our great 'existential threats' (to paraphrase Chomsky).
Moreover, in principle (although not realistic), even if everyone else acts foolishly and get sick, you could still self-isolate and get away from the decease. There is no way to hide under the bed from the more devastating effects of an environmental catastrophe. Seems like a great time to put pressure on those in power, and pursue constructive change.
Although unintuitive, it may be rewarding to find a correspondence between the two in order to bridge the disastrous ‘environmental epidemic’, with the relatively more favourable ‘plague scenario’.
Additional Remark: If conscience is taken into account, then ordinary people also have stronger incentives to take precaution in epidemics because their actions potentially have direct, and tangible effects on the lives of others. The impact of the ordinary consumer is however a negligible part of the total impact of the world population.