Veterans of past epidemics have long warned that American society is trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. After every crisis—anthrax, SARS, flu, Ebola—attention is paid and investments are made. But after short periods of peacetime, memories fade and budgets dwindle. This trend transcends red and blue administrations. When a new normal sets in, the abnormal once again becomes unimaginable. But there is reason to think that COVID-19 might be a disaster that leads to more radical and lasting change.

The other major epidemics of recent decades either barely affected the U.S. (SARS, MERS, Ebola), were milder than expected (H1N1 flu in 2009), or were mostly limited to specific groups of people (Zika, HIV). The COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, is affecting everyone directly, changing the nature of their everyday life. That distinguishes it not only from other diseases, but also from the other systemic challenges of our time. When an administration prevaricates on climate change, the effects won’t be felt for years, and even then will be hard to parse. It’s different when a president says that everyone can get a test, and one day later, everyone cannot. Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.

After 9/11, the world focused on counterterrorism. After COVID-19, attention may shift to public health. Expect to see a spike in funding for virology and vaccinology, a surge in students applying to public-health programs, and more domestic production of medical supplies. Expect pandemics to top the agenda at the United Nations General Assembly. Anthony Fauci is now a household name. “Regular people who think easily about what a policewoman or firefighter does finally get what an epidemiologist does,” says Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Such changes, in themselves, might protect the world from the next inevitable disease. “The countries that had lived through SARS had a public consciousness about this that allowed them to leap into action,” said Ron Klain, the former Ebola czar. “The most commonly uttered sentence in America at the moment is, ‘I’ve never seen something like this before.’ That wasn’t a sentence anyone in Hong Kong uttered.” For the U.S., and for the world, it’s abundantly, viscerally clear what a pandemic can do.

The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions. Such dynamics will be pivotal in the coming months, says Ilan Goldenberg, a foreign-policy expert at the Center for a New American Security. “The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes….”

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🚨I wrote a big piece about the future of the COVID-19 pandemic: how the US got to this point; what needs to happen in the coming weeks and months; what the endgame looks like; and what the world might be like in the aftermath. https://t.co/woc4dxwT0Z

— Ed Yong (@edyong209) March 25, 2020

As COVID-19 ravages the U.S., more state and local officials are placing stringent restrictions on residents’ activities in an effort to curb the spread of the virus. Two-thirds of Americans say they are following news stories about the pandemic “very closely,” with the same percentage saying the situation has disrupted their lives — either a great deal (30%) or a fair amount (36%). Nearly as many expect it to take a few more months (51%) or longer (12%) for the level of disruption to travel, work, school and public events to improve, while 36% say it will only be a few more weeks.

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Most U.S. Adults Expect Long-Term COVID-19 Disruption https://t.co/22B9SSsNR7 pic.twitter.com/ZpUFXZvgDg

— UConn SurveyResearch (@UConnSurvey) March 25, 2020

It is very useful–check it out.

STAT has launched a new #covid19 data tracker with helpful data on case numbers by country, state, province and county. Helpful information. Check it out here: https://t.co/lxjpAXI5SE

— Adam Feuerstein (@adamfeuerstein) March 26, 2020

A generation ago, the essayist and novelist Wendell Berry told us that the great challenge of our time would be whether we would see life as a machine or as a miracle. The same is true now. The value of a human life is not determined on a balance sheet. We cannot coldly make decisions as to how many people we are willing to lose since “we are all going to die of something.”

A life in a nursing home is a life worth living. A life in a hospital quarantine ward is a life worth living. The lives of our grandparents, the lives of the disabled, the lives of the terminally ill, these are all lives worth living. We will not be able to save every life. Many will die, not only of the obviously vulnerable but also of those who are seemingly young and strong. But every life lost must grip us with a sense of lament, that death itself is not natural but is, as the Bible tells us, an enemy to be withstood and, ultimately, undone.

That means we must listen to medical experts, and do everything possible to avoid the catastrophe we see right now in Italy and elsewhere. We must get back to work, get the economy back on its feet, but we can only do that when doing so will not kill the vulnerable and overwhelm our hospitals, our doctors, our nurses, and our communities.

And along the way we must guard our consciences. We cannot pass by on the side of the road when the elderly, the disabled, the poor, and the vulnerable are in peril before our eyes. We want to hear the sound of cash registers again, but we cannot afford to hear them over the cries of those made in the image of God….

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“A life in a nursing home is a life worth living. A life in a hospital quarantine ward is a life worth living. The lives of our grandparents, the lives of the disabled, the lives of the terminally ill, these are all lives worth living,” writes @drmoore. https://t.co/a47CB8Ki2x

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) March 26, 2020

Watch and listen to it all.

It was Friday March 13 when doctors at the largest healthcare provider in New York City decided to take the search for a coronavirus drug into their own hands. Many of their Covid-19 patients were not getting better — and some were getting worse.

Two of the hospitals’ scientists each called their contacts at US biotech companies Gilead Sciences and Regeneron to offer to test their potential treatments: an antiviral called remdesivir and an anti-inflammatory called Kevzara, developed for Ebola and rheumatoid arthritis respectively. Clinicians, researchers and regulators rushed to set up the clinical trials, which usually take months, and just four days later two patients took their first doses of the experimental drugs.

“The patients were very, very sick,” says Kevin Tracey, president of the Feinstein Institute, the research arm of Northwell Health. “Everybody just rolled up their sleeves and said we’re facing a crisis and the patients need this. After30 years of doing research, it was one of the proudest days of my life to know patients were getting treated with these drugs that may help them.”

The hospital hopes the drugs will stop the replication of the virus and reduce the inflammation in the lungs of the patients.

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Free to read: The world cannot afford to wait 18 months to find a coronavirus vaccine. Instead, clinical trials are focusing on drugs developed for other diseases, from Ebola to malaria and arthritis, which they hope could also treat Covid-19 https://t.co/SLOdEpvSUz

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) March 26, 2020

In several hours on Tuesday, Dr. Ashley Bray performed chest compressions at Elmhurst Hospital Center on a woman in her 80s, a man in his 60s and a 38-year-old who reminded the doctor of her fiancé. All had tested positive for the coronavirus and had gone into cardiac arrest. All eventually died.

Elmhurst, a 545-bed public hospital in Queens, has begun transferring patients not suffering from coronavirus to other facilities as it moves toward becoming one dedicated entirely to the outbreak. Doctors and nurses have struggled to make do with a few dozen ventilators. Calls over a loudspeaker of “Team 700,” the code for when a patient is on the verge of death, come several times a shift. Some have died inside the emergency room while waiting for a bed.

A refrigerated truck has been stationed outside to hold the bodies of the dead. Over the past 24 hours, New York City’s public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst had died.

“It’s apocalyptic,” said Dr. Bray, 27, a general medicine resident at the hospital.

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People have died in the ER while waiting for a bed. There aren’t enough ventilators. This entire hospital will soon be dedicated to the coronavirus.

New York City hospitals are at the center of the pandemic in the U.S. “It’s apocalyptic,” one doctor said. https://t.co/f6kJU33yI7

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 25, 2020

In little more than ten years St. Paul established the Church in four provinces of the Empire, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia and Asia. Before AD 47 there were no churches in these provinces; in AD 57 St. Paul could speak as if his work there was done, and could plan extensive tours into the far west without anxiety lest the churches which he had founded might perish in his absence for want of his guidance and support.

The work of the Apostle during these ten years can therefore be treated as a unity. Whatever assistance he may have received from the preaching of others, it is unquestioned that the establishment of the churches in these provinces was really his work. In the pages of the New Testament he, and he alone, stands forth as their founder. And the work which he did was really a completed work. So far as the foundation of the churches is concerned, it is perfectly clear that the writer of the Acts intends to represent St. Paul’s work as complete. The churches were really established. Whatever disasters fell upon them in later years, whatever failure there was, whatever ruin, that failure was not due to any insufficiency or lack of care and completeness in the Apostle’s teaching or organization. When he left them he left them because his work was fully accomplished.

This is truly an astonishing fact. That churches should be founded so rapidly, so securely, seems to us today, accustomed to the difficulties, the uncertainties, the failures, the disastrous relapses of our own missionary work, almost incredible. Many missionaries in later days have received a larger number of converts than St. Paul; many have preached over a wider area than he; but none have so established churches. We have long forgotten that such things could be. We have long accustomed ourselves to accept it as an axiom of missionary work that converts in a new country must be submitted to a very long probation and training, extending over generations before they can be expected to be able to stand alone. Today if a man ventures to suggest that there may be something in the methods by which St. Paul attained such wonderful results worthy of our careful attention, and perhaps of our imitation, he is in danger of being accused of revolutionary tendencies.

–Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours; A Study of The Church In The Four Provinces, Chapter One

“A man does not need to know much to lay hold on Christ. St. Paul began with simplicity and brevity.”
-Roland Allen pic.twitter.com/sKNHXmPYQq

— Philip Nation (@philipnation) September 5, 2018

Almighty God, by whose Spirit the Scriptures were opened to thy servant Roland Allen, so that he might lead many to know, live and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ: Give us grace to follow his example, that the variety of those to whom we reach out in love may receive thy saving Word and witness in their own languages and cultures to thy glorious Name; through Jesus Christ, thy Word made flesh, who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Prepare for our 2019 theme of Missional Ecclesiology by reading the works of renowned missiologist Roland Allen. https://t.co/ooybDZd4VF pic.twitter.com/YNHu2CgwBm

— The Telos Collective (@TelosCollective) July 31, 2018

O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst feed the multitude by the lakeside, using the humble gifts of a boy’s generous impulse, and a disciple’s faith in thy power: Help us in thy Church to call forth such generosity in others, and strengthen our faith that the hungry millions can be fed; for thy name’s sake,

Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.

–Psalm 69:1-2