Casebook I: Pandemic Response — COVID-19 Through the Zero Leap Theory Lens (Zero Leap Theory Series — Paper 38)

This casebook does not ask whether pandemic interventions were well-intentioned.It asks whether they were structurally viable. Using the Zero Leap Theory (ZLT) framework, this paper analyzes COVID-19 responses as a system-level intervention problem rather than a purely epidemiological one. It examines how policies interacted with consent (𝒞), stability (η), legitimacy/alignment (Φ), memory (𝓗), and observability (𝒪), and why measures that appeared effective in the short term often generated delayed resistance, institutional lock-in, and long-run fragility. The paper introduces the Pandemic Lock-in Index (PLI) to measure how “temporary” emergency measures persist structurally, and IAS-PAN, a domain-specific audit protocol for pandemic interventions. Comparative cases—including Sweden as a structural control—are used to distinguish intensity from viability, and to show how compliance can mask legitimacy collapse under coercive conditions. This is not a moral judgment and not a denial of disease severity. It is a forensic analysis of intervention design under epistemic uncertainty. The central claim is ethical and practical: when observability is low and social memory is high, failing to audit intervention boundaries transforms emergency policy into a systemic risk.