[late]

"Anderson made seminal contributions to our understanding of fundamental interactions that make up matter, but to many scientists (and the public) he may be best known for an article he wrote called “More Is Different,” which describes how at different levels of complexity, new conceptual frameworks are required.

This ever-increasing degree of “more” by necessity begets a similar exponential evolution of mitigation strategies. At the beginning of the outbreak, efforts were focused on contact tracing to identify individuals who came in contact with known COVID-19 cases. As the outbreak grew, the efforts focused on containment not at the level of interactions among individuals, but at the level of larger groups and whole regions

As the scale of the pandemic increases, it requires new ways of thinking about the problem, going from the level of individuals, to the isolation of whole regions or groups of people, and then reverting back to a focus on the individual level.

Our country has always been more than the sum of its parts, a fact grammatically codified at the end of the Civil War, when the United States began being referred to in the singular.

But the COVID-19 War—which, absent an integrated response, could still end up killing as many as that terrible divisional conflict did—requires the emergence of an America prepared to be not only more than, but different from, the sum of individual states. COVID-19 is not the first pandemic, and it will not be the last. But it should be the last fought with a fragmented army, unready for a steely battle with invisible but morbidly persistent enemies."

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-a-landmark-physics-paper-from-the-1970s-uncannily-describes-the-covid-19-pandemic/