The GCBR After COVID-19

The concept of Global Catastrophic Biological Risks appeared in mid-2010’s to assist the cognitive preparation and anticipation of bioevents. The COVID-19 pandemic amply demonstrated that vigilance, preparedness and response lagged behind expectations when seriously challenged in a global scale. A reappraisal of the concept is (over)due. Intellectual processing of the issue lies in the hard core of the definition, impact, ramifications, distribution; its development in spatiotemporal context and the perceptive processing of its causality, factuality and dynamics are all needed to create a cognitive basis for the next challenge. The preparedness, vigilance, resilience and response attributes to forestall, contain and resolve an incident before escalating to planetary catastrophe are all dependent upon such intellectual preparation, to establish priorities, successive horizons of events and dwell upon available resources and methods of resource management. This chapter first tackles the exhaustive analysis of the GCBR concept: its attributes from spatial occurrence and temporal extent to the generations of the bioagents in perpetrated events and the causality and the transmittance of the outbreaks; then, it dwells on the ramifications of such occurrences, and last, it makes provisions for possible or probable, or even less probable future developments.