The summer before COVID-19 struck the world, infecting millions worldwide and plunging the United States into a near-national shutdown, epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo led a team tasked with answering a hypothetical, ominously prescient question: what if a respiratory pathogen were to go global What would happen?

The report was commissioned by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, an independent advocacy group jointly established by the World Health Organization and the World Bank Group, to examine global preparedness for a pandemic. The report is based on a survey of global preparedness for a pandemic. The report was released in September 2019, four months before the first case of the novel coronavirus was confirmed in Wuhan, China. The findings were this: if a new virus emerged, it would spread faster than we could contain it. According to the report, we were not prepared.

That doesn't mean we can't be prepared in the future. In fact, our global health, and life as we know it, depends on it. Nuzzo, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and director of the Outbreak Observatory, an independent research project focused on infectious disease control, is responsible for assessing our ability to contain outbreaks and providing recommendations. She is also the co-creator of the Global Health Security Index, a system that scores 195 countries on their ability to cope with a pandemic. During the outbreak of the new coronavirus, the United States received the top score on this index. President Trump waved the report at the camera during an early COVID-19 press conference. According to Nuzzo, "What the report actually says is that no country is ready. Yes, the U.S. had the highest score, but any flaw in any area could break the response"

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The government's ineptitude should serve as a lesson to the administration. Quick action is critical: Nuzzo says that if we had responded proactively in the first place, isolating infected persons and tracking contacts, social distance in the U.S. would have been inevitable. The U.S. has a stockpile of medical supplies, including masks, but it was not adequately replenished after the 2009 flu outbreak, Nuzzo says. The White House does not have a dedicated department for infectious diseases, and President Trump effectively disbanded this department in 2018. That means there is no accurate, secure, centralized way to track the spread of disease. (She recommends using technology such as bluetooth-enabled apps to track cases.) The key to beating a COVID-19 outbreak in the fall, she assures us, will "almost certainly" be.

It will require political will and investment. According to Nuzzo, peak readiness was in the mid-1990s, when the government spent nearly $7 billion on public health emergency and disaster preparedness and response. Since then, appropriations for this purpose have declined. More than a decade later, the U.S. is rushing through a $2 trillion stimulus package to prop up its ailing economy. The health care system is clearly under pressure to cut costs. But leaner organizations are not necessarily more resilient. We must rethink equipping our health care system for the 21st century and the fact that we may be living in the age of pandemics." If the government will not act, then we have no choice but to demand change by voting and writing letters.

As for the U.S. reigning index score, Nuzzo says that if we leave current events as they are, "we are losing a few points. Hopefully, we can get it back," Nuzzo says.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of Marie Claire.

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