Hello and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Ryan Boiler.

We're about two and a half years into the coronavirus pandemic now, and for almost the entire

time, after the goal of eradicating the virus slipped out of reach, we've kind of danced

around the question of the next pandemic.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, experts have indicated, without always explaining why, that novel diseases are becoming

more common, that there will be more deadly pandemics, that there's no reason to assume

that the next one will be milder than COVID-19, and that with any lock, everything that went

wrong with efforts to contain the coronavirus will chase in global leaders in a way that

helps us better weather future pandemics.

So ideally, the next time doctors notice people getting sick with something they don't recognize,

they'll alert the world sooner, they'll institute containment measures more aggressively.

If those fail, people will be able to snap into the stop the spread mode with less uncertainty.

Economies will be more resilient to pandemic conditions, scientists will be faster to produce

vaccines and therapies, though they were very fast this last time around too.

These will have new streamline procedures for pandemic conditions, and public health

experts will do a better job communicating with the public about risks and mitigation and

the uncertainty around both.

It's a nice thought, at least so long as we're doomed to be stuck in an age of pandemics,

but it's also pretty plainly not what's happened yet.

In the US, at least COVID-19 exhaustion and a kind of tacit political detente around

the issue prevailed, pandemic preparedness slipped way down the legislative priority list.

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