There’s a five-year-old video making the rounds in which Bill Gates warns about the next big catastrophe. Of course, the next big catastrophe looks like the coronavirus. But what did Bill Gates and various other doom-sayers warn about that hasn’t happened (and probably won’t happen)? Make enough predictions and some of them will come true.

In any event, how prepared was the U.S. for the current crisis? A team assembled under the aegis of Johns Hopkins University studied the problem last year. The report is here.

Scroll down to the ranking of countries by estimated level of preparedness. The U.S. is at the top of the list. Nevertheless, the authors of the study concluded that overall preparedness was weak; the U.S. simply looked like the best prepared among generally ill-prepared countries.

A big gap in such assessments, and in thinking generally about preparedness, is the ability of a country’s private sector (the actual producers of products and services) to respond to and rebound from major shocks. The U.S. certainly ranks high (if not highest) on that score.