Pandemic: We Need To Be Smarter Than China (And Italy)

**This article has been amended in light of the ongoing situation in Italy.

In the winter of 2017 two 17-year-olds with a 3-D printer created a little spinny thingy called the Fidget360 and promoted it on social media.

Fidget spinners quickly went viral. And because there was no patent, dozens of companies hurried to produce knockoffs.

By May of 2017 the little gadgets accounted for 17% of all online toy sales and had spun their way into every nook and cranny of the globe. Every kid I tended to in the emergency department of my hospital was spinning one of the plastic gizmos — and more often than not, so were their parents.

But then — just as quickly as it started — it was over. By September of 2017 fidget spinners had vanished, consigned to trash bins and forgotten corners of toy rooms and closets.

There’s a word we use to describe this sort of phenomenon, where something spreads quickly throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population before burning itself out.

That word is pandemic, of course. We use it to describe massive outbreaks of disease, typically, not outbreaks of fidget spinners.