Having read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague in the 1990s, a pandemic was the most obvious prediction possible. Only timing is the hard part. We got rather lucky that our research on SARS-CoV-1 was available in advance, along with the new development of lipids for mRNA vaccines. Without that, 1% death rate was certainly possible with COVID, if not the 2.5% predicted in the article. Which is still much better than historical pandemics like plague and smallpox in the New World.

Though, uh, maybe all that research made pandemic possible in the first place. Anyway a miss by one order of magnitude on a virus that does exponential growth is really good but obvious prediction. Public policy should definitely plan to deal with outbreaks on this scale of death.

The thing is, "upward of" denotes a lower bound, not an upper bound.

We’re not entirely done with this last one yet, either.

There is a plague like this every so many years, so not difficult to predict.