How to Prevent the Next Pandemic summary

If you think about it, it’s kind of odd that we don’t have a branch of emergency services dedicated to preventing pandemics.

To put it into perspective, the US employs about 311,000 full-time firefighters across 30,000 departments throughout the country. In all, local governments spend over $50 billion a year just to have firefighting crews on call in the event of a fire. That might seem like a lot of money to prepare for an event that’s relatively rare, but it's worth it. It’d be far more costly, in terms of both money and lives, to be unprepared if a fire did break out.

Disease surveillance was an obscure field for most of its existence. That changed when COVID-19 thrust it into the limelight. Of course, it would have helped to have paid more attention before we were hit by a pandemic – but better late than never. 

Put simply, disease surveillance is about keeping track of diseases – detecting outbreaks and monitoring how they spread through a population. The information this provides helps with everything from shaping public policy to selecting which strain of flu to vaccinate people against each year.

Disease surveillance is the first defense in any pandemic prevention plan. If we have any hope of stopping a disease, we obviously first need to know that it exists. The next step would be to roll out treatments and vaccines to combat the disease as quickly as possible.

Now, if there’s one thing we got right during Covid – which surprised even the experts – it was this aspect. The fact that scientists were able to design multiple vaccines in the space of a year was unprecedented in the history of medicine. But what was even more miraculous was the sheer speed and scope with which we managed to get them into people’s arms all over the world. Vaccines really were the great success story of the whole Covid pandemic.

Part of the reason we were caught so off guard by Covid was that we’d grown complacent. We hadn’t experienced a truly devastating pandemic, at least not in the West, since the 1918 influenza – and that was a hundred years ago. We can’t allow time to make us so complacent again.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to solve this problem. We can run periodic practice exercises to test our global response systems and keep them alert. 

There’s a big elephant in the room that needs to be addressed before we wrap up – and that elephant is inequality. Another lesson many of us learned the hard way during Covid is that the pandemic didn’t affect everybody equally.

Within the US, Black, Latino, and Native American people were twice as likely to die during the pandemic than white people. On an international level, the situation was just as dire. In 2020, nearly 100 million people around the world were forced into extreme poverty – the first time global poverty has gone up in decades.