Alexander’s keynote goes back to 1920, to Samuel Henry Prince, who wrote about catastrophes already at this time. If for example an electricity failure would happen, this would affect different parts of everybody’s life, like failing technologies, but also no chance for the government to reach the society in usal ways. Climate change and terrorism often come together, but with great geophysical events like volcanic eruptions there can also be an impact on the climate, and in the end this can lead to other risks.
Covid-19, on the other side, also created many different problems beside the health danger, like public fear, financial problems or economical instability. Alexander describes this by the “egg hypothesis”, showing the picture of a fried egg: The disaster, the egg yolk, is the disaster with its vulnerabilities, dynamic pressures and root causes, and around it is the context, with aspects like poverty, deprivation and discrimination.