While the world is still in battling COVID-19, it’s already time to start preparing for the next pandemic—above all, how to prevent it. As we’ve unfortunately seen, governments improvising reactively have little chance of containing a determined virus. Disjointed action based on too little information allowed a local outbreak of an unknown pathogen in Wuhan, China, to grow into a full-blown pandemic. The obvious lesson is that the international community needs a new approach to preventing future pandemics, including a way to quickly verify outbreak data by independent teams of investigators.
In short, we need to take pandemic containment as seriously as we take other dangers of mass destruction, such as nuclear proliferation and chemical weapons. Global treaties to prevent the spread of these weapons offer a toolbox that can be used or adapted to help prevent the spread of viruses as well.
