80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

Our lives currently revolve around the global emergency of COVID-19; you’re probably reading this while confined to your house, as the death toll from the worst pandemic since 1918 continues to rise. The question of how to tackle COVID-19 has been foremost in the minds of many, including here at 80,000 Hours. Today's guest, Dr Gregory Lewis, acting head of the Biosecurity Research Group at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, puts the crisis in context, explaining how COVID-19 compares to other diseases, pandemics of the past, and possible worse crises in the future. COVID-19 is a vivid reminder that we are unprepared to contain or respond to new pathogens. How would we cope with a virus that was even more contagious and even more deadly? Greg's work focuses on these risks -- of outbreaks that threaten our entire future through an unrecoverable collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity. Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. If such a catastrophe were to o