Are We Experiencing a Secondary Epidemic?

By Kevin Buckley

Kevin J. Buckley retired from the Central Intelligence Agency as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service. He is a recipient of the CIA Career Intelligence Medal and served for over 24 years supporting the Intelligence collection effort in East Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and Eurasia.  His duties included crisis response, risk mitigation analysis, assessment of personnel for high-risk assignments and selection and training of Operations Officers. He has extensive knowledge of foreign environments as well as the disciplines of Foreign Intelligence collection, Counterintelligence, Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation.

OPINION — The scientific, medical, public health and morbidity/mortality reporting as well as the media writ large, are all documenting the profound negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the physical and economic wellbeing of the global population.

We measure this in lives lost, the outsize impact of the virus on service industry workers and minority communities, and the worrying emerging chronic sequelae of the virus for some who have recovered are all documented by reliable sources like the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Estimates of the economic disruption attributable to the pandemic can be found in reports by the US Federal Reserve, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and The Brookings Institution.

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