This paper explores the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic through the framework of existential risks – a class of extreme risks that threaten the entire future of humanity. In doing so, we tease out three lessons: (1) possible reasons underlying the limits and shortfalls of international law, international institutions and other actors which Covid-19 has revealed, and what they reveal about the resilience or fragility of institutional frameworks in the face of existential risks; (2) using Covid-19 to test and refine our prior ‘Boring Apocalypses’ model for understanding the interplay of hazards, vulnerabilities and exposures in facilitating a particular disaster, or magnifying its effects; and (3) to extrapolate some possible futures for existential risk scholarship and governance.

本文通过存在风险框架探讨了正在发生的Covid -19大流行，该风险是威胁人类整个未来的一类极端风险。为此，我们从中汲取了三个教训：（1）Covid -19揭示了国际法，国际机构和其他行为者的局限性和不足的潜在原因，以及它们揭示了机构框架在适应性和脆弱性方面的表现。面对存在的风险；（2）使用Covid-19测试和完善我们以前的“无聊启示录”模型，以了解危害，脆弱性和暴露因素在促进特定灾难或扩大其影响方面的相互作用；（3）推断存在的风险学术和治理的一些可能的未来。