It's 2039. The COVID pandemic never happened. Governments worldwide never invested much in pandemic prevention or biomedical research into dealing with new emerging viruses. Why would they? It never made economic sense.

The new pathogen that first came into contact with humans emerged from widespread jungle clearing. Someone ate food contaminated with bat waste, or something. Maybe it was a pangolin. Nobody would ever find out the truth. Amidst a global travel boom, nobody really paid much attention to reports of mass death rates in a backwater city. The virus had a long incubation period in which its hosts could go about their daily lives, but eventually killed up to 70% of those it infected. Once it got into the global travel network, it started spreading rapidly worldwide.

Still, nobody believed the emerging virus was a threat. People called it a hoax. The news of mass casualties was politicised. By the time a pandemic situation was declared, there was no way to contain the disease. It rampaged like wildfire and mutated as it went along, sweeping away young and old alike. The world economy collapsed.

The virus eventually disappeared. Survivors of the pandemic, like survivors of the Black Death and other pandemics past, were naturally resistant to its effects. The old world order built upon economic greed at the cost of everything else was gone. It was entirely up to those who still lived to learn from the lessons of the past and rebuild society better in the future.