  How are economies in a modern age impacted by epidemics? In what ways is
economic life disrupted? How can pandemics be modeled? What can be done to
mitigate and manage the danger? Does the threat of pandemics increase or
decrease in the modern world? The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the
importance of these questions and the potential of complex systems science to
provide answers. This article offers a broad overview of the history of
pandemics, of established facts, and of models of infection diffusion,
mitigation strategies, and economic impact. The example of the Covid-19
pandemic is used to illustrate the theoretical aspects, but the article also
includes considerations concerning other historic epidemics and the danger of
more infectious and less controllable outbreaks in the future.
