Mandalay, Myanmar“Do you know how to distribute food?”

Aung Ko Ko was trying to learn—fast—how disaster relief works. The young hotel manager in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, was scouring the web on his smart phone, searching for nutritional guidelines for food aid during famines, a bleak but possible endgame of the COVID-19 pandemic among the world’s weaker economies. He texted business friends to organize a head count of his city’s most vulnerable citizens: the homeless mainly, but also destitute day laborers who couldn’t self-isolate without starving. And he even resorted to asking the advice of the last guests at his all-but-empty tourist lodge, whose business was wiped out by the worst global health crisis in a century.

“We don’t really know