Although the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the operations of facilities and offices on an international scale, it was not the world’s first experience of a coronavirus. According to Tim Sly, this is the third one in 20 years but the first two only escalated at a small scale.
“We had local outbreaks, but neither of them approached anything like a pandemic,” he said. “All of the textbook approaches to what we do with pandemics [weren't] followed. This virus hadn’t read that same text.”