I’m sure many of you know what the Great Filter is, but if you want to brush up, it’s pretty well summed up on Wikipedia:
Is COVID-19 the Great Filter? Have we already surmounted the Great Filter?
No. In the history of our species this is a minor blip.
No. Pandemics can happen to all species, intelligent or unintelligent. No relevance.
The OP doesn’t even make any sense as a question. The Great Filter, by definition, prevents life on a planet from getting THIS far.
In any event, in the grand scheme of things, COVID-19 won’t slow down the human race at all. It’s not going to even make the All-Star team of plagues.
SARS-CoV-2 is an Inland Empire 66er short stop hoping to make the Rocket City Trash Pandas. It’s not even at the top of the minor leagues in terms of mortality potential, much less a potential extinction pandemic. When it can go pitch for pitch with the Plague of Justinian, the 735-737 Japanese smallpox epidemic, or the Black Death, then we’ll talk about trying out for the majors.
Stranger
Not necessarily. Great filters are attempts to answer the “Fermi Paradox”* IOW the question, “If the universe is so big and so old where are all the aliens?” It is quite possible that we haven’t passed all the filters yet. A number of these “late filters” have been proposed and until humanity expands throughout the galaxy we won’t know if we’ve passed all the filters or not.
WRT COVID-19, it probably isn’t. We’ve dealt with worse, as a species. It may be deadly to individuals or (maybe) nation-states, but homo Sapiens will survive.
*It should be called the “Fermi Question” or similar since it isn’t really a paradox, but sometimes we get stuck with bad names for things. Don’t get me started on the “Anthropic Principle”
The answer is no. However biotechnology that allows lethal viruses to be created at a lower and lower cost could be the great filter or a part of it. What happens when a doomsday cult has access to the technology to design a virus perfectly calibrated in infectiousness and lethality to cause maximum damage? It may be possible in a few decades. In general declining costs of creating WMD may be the great filter. All advanced species may reach a point of technological progress where it simply becomes impossible to control WMD technology and the resulting chaos drags the whole species back to pre-industrial levels of technology.