Sure, this is not exactly breaking news; decades of global environmental heedlessness paint a grim picture of modernity’s responsiveness to scientific foreboding.

But this novel coronavirus illustrates the problem more acutely. If it doesn’t kill us it should at least shake us out of the delusion that we can keep ignoring the science and scientists who are warning about the long-term dangers to our way of life. Religious texts say that societies face destruction when they forget God. The coronavirus, like the accelerating climate-related disaster, shows what we face when we decide to blind ourselves to science.

This is what happens when you ignore and silence front-line doctors who warn of impending disaster, as authorities in China did in the early days of the outbreak: a possible global epidemiological and economic catastrophe.

This is what happens when you gut the United States’ pandemic-response infrastructure, as Donald Trump has spent the last few years doing: a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that botches the most basic defense against disease — testing for it.

I wish these were one-off errors that we could attribute to authoritarian Chinese Communism or routine Trumpian incompetence. But they point to an underlying global dysfunction, one that transcends political parties and styles of government.