I've been wondering for a while what lessons we should take from the COVID pandemic. We've had three years to collect data, after all, and another pandemic is likely to come along someday.
Nobody with real expertise seems to have written about this, so I figure I'll take a crack at it. If nothing else, maybe we'll learn something just from all the different ways that people call me stupid.
Note that this is generic advice. Obviously it will change depending on the viral characteristics of the next pandemic.
Things we should be doing now
- Improving ventilation in interior spaces like schools, churches, and so forth.
- Installing far UV lamps in places where they'd be effective.
- Improving our emergency vaccine production ability.
If a pandemic occurs, things we should emphasize less
- Cleaning hands and surfaces. As far as I know, there were virtually no cases of COVID from touching a contaminated surface.
- Worrying about the outdoors. With a few isolated exceptions, it's mostly OK to go outside normally with or without a mask.
- Closing schools. The bulk of the evidence suggests that with proper safeguards it's safer to keep schools open than to close them.
Things we should do differently/more of
- MAGA crackpottery aside, masks work. But we should be stockpiling N95 masks and insisting on them right out of the gate if a new virus starts to spread.
- Superspreader events were a major cause of large scale spread, and there's no real way to address this except by shutting down indoor events where lots of people sit near each other. This includes movies, live theaters, sports events, and, I'm sorry to say, churches. The virus doesn't care why you're packed in together, and superspreader events hurt everyone, not just the people who attend them. Needless to say, these rules can be relaxed or made more specific as more becomes known about the new virus.
- Encourage outdoor seating at restaurants and, where possible, allow it to happen with a minimum of red tape.
- Do everything possible to approve and distribute home testing kits as soon as possible.
- Social distancing . . . I'm not sure about. What's the evidence for or against it in places like malls and supermarkets?
What else?
A lot of these are assuming that the next pandemic will be exactly like Covid. For example, just because Covid didn't spread via surfaces, that doesn't mean the next bug won't.
Google paid 99 dollars an hour on the internet. Everything I did was basic Οnline w0rk from comfort at hΟme for 5-7 hours per day that I g0t from this office I f0und over the web and they paid me 100 dollars each hour. For more details
visit this article... https://createmaxwealth.blogspot.com
I definitely believe it would be prudent to emphasize handwashing when the next new virus arrives; the public messaging should be candid, i.e., something to the effect of “Pay attention to careful handwashing; doing so may protect you, and your loved ones.” If the research ultimately shows this is not a major concern, then obviously communicate that, too.
Disagree with your last sentence. Hand washing should never ever be discouraged - so many diseases spread via failure to wash well.
I don't advocate actively discouraging handwashing. Nonetheless, there's been a lot of sharp criticism of the obfuscations of health officials, especially early in the pandemic (mainly on masking). I think the bitching about his has been wildly overdone, mind you, but still, it's probably best for them to be scrupulously honest next time around.
So, if, say, during the next pandemic, it were found that there's zero or almost zero risk of virus spread by hand or surfaces, they should tell us that....perhaps something along the lines of "The evidence suggests this virus isn't spread via the skin, nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution it's always a good idea to be careful to wash your hands. Some viruses can be spread through touch, and a weakened immune system is not what you want at this time yada yada yada."
Exactly: it would be a fundamental error to presume that surfaces cleaning is a non-response just because of Covid profile ended up being that it's not that surfaces transmissable. Plenty of other cases are so not an excludable.
It is likely that the next pandemic will be a respiratory disease, i.,e,. it spreads by people inhaling the virus, like in the case of COVID. Our waste water system can be relied upon to prevent diseases like Cholera that are acquired by eating or bringing the the infection.
The third category would be a disease spread by insects like Malaria. They require very different measures but they don't seem to be the main danger in developed countries.
Insect-borne diseases have not so far been a major disruption in temperate regions, but Lyme, West Nile and Western Equine Encephalitis can be serious. They just haven’t spread readily. Fortunately.
This sounds just like pre-COVID pandemic planning. In 2020 everyone assumed the next pandemic would behave just like influenza and so the early response was tailored to that -- emphasis on handwashing, 6ft distancing, protection of children, etc. If we now simply assume the next pandemic will be just like COVID we'll likely be similarly surprised. I think a degree of humility and willingness to improvise and adjust countermeasures on the fly will end up being more valuable.
I also think the political and social situation is critical to think about. If US authorities institute mask mandates in response to a new pandemic there will certainly be massive backlash and noncompliance. We need to think about what measures will be politically tolerated and when, as well as how to grow support for them.
I still wipe down everything that comes into the house and I still liberally apply hand sanitizer whenever I am out. Result: I haven't had so much as a sniffle in the last four years.
I wash my hands like I always and have not had a sniffle in years predating Covid. When I took mass transit if I heard a sniffle or a cough I’d leave the car. No matter what, even if it meant standing for 1/2 an hour. Prudent enough, no need for mass sterilization but whatever works for you…
Post hoc, prompter hoc!
Tell me, I'm curious: how do you figure? This ought to be interesting.
That's our case too. We used to have awful colds / flu every damned year. Then we started masking up, washing and disinfecting. I can't believe how much some people miss having a damned cold or a nasty case of the flu.
It does seem like Kevin is fighting the last war. I think what is most important is plan to be flexable as possible and try to understand the characteristics of the current disease and not asume it is transmitted the same way as the last one. That was a major problem of the plan pre-Covid.
Kevin says right here,
Needless to say, these rules can be relaxed or made more specific as more becomes known about the new virus.
Exactly, and, aside from what he has said, what is the better idea that can help?
Japan and South Korea had high compliance with health regulations their governments laid out, while the US and most European countries are trapped with a national crime population that will do nothing whatsoever in the public interest.
This is what has to be dealt with before the next pandemic strikes.
What we have is a national infestation of Borderers. Unfortunately, unlike the kings of old, we can't ship them elsewhere.
Not even to Australia???
Antartica would be an attractive option were it not for international treaty obligations.
You mean south of the Mason-Dixon line?
In some places in this country there will be no rules or ability to make them. There will be far more deaths and that will be just fine for a large portion of this country. Us talking about it here is pie in the sky. What we see on the ground is a large minority or even a majority of people who believe masks, vaccines, and other mitigations don’t work and are conspiracies to harm them. We are, as a country, in deep shit if something like Covid happens again in the next 20 years or so.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/03/08/covid-public-health-backlash/
We could prepare for the next virus the way we prepare for the next war. In other words, plenty of funding, lots of supplies on hand and rotated to assure freshness. Keeping equipment on hand and up to date. All doctors could receive periodic training for emergency service. A medical National Guard of people who train for emergencies and have the ability to provide assistance to medical staff. A medical joint chiefs of staff of top doctors who specialize in various fields who work on strategies to mitigate damage caused by various types of contagious diseases. Funding for vaccine research and the ability to produce vaccines quickly.
Medicare for all.
I’d like to see us develop air cheap scrubbers that could be deployed to classrooms, offices, churches, stores, etc.
An air scrubber passes air through a box that contains a very large surface area and sprays water across this area. Think of nested whiffle balls being sprayed by water misters. The large surface area captures virtually all particles. Instead of having to change filters you simply change the water as needed. You can also check the water for viruses. Combine this with some cardboard ducts to spread clean air near the ceiling and put air intakes at floor level. Engineers who build semiconductor fabs have worked out this airflow decades ago. We should use their knowledge.
If a pathogen is not airborne then it is unlikely to be very infectious. If it only passes by touch then gloves and maybe simple masks (so you don’t touch your face) will be effective. Contact tracing might be more effective as well.
It would be good to engineer a good N95 mask that was more comfortable to wear and easier to ensure a good fit.
All pandemics are going to be just like COVID??
No indoor events with lots of people packed close together....except for schools?
Hmmmm, because schools will have unspecified 'proper safeguards'?
umm, ok.
Hmmmm, because schools will have unspecified 'proper safeguards'?
I was wondering about that too. I would guess Kevin is using a very holistic approach. He doesn't state closing schools failed to reduce the spread of disease. Rather, he states closing schools wasn't as safe as keeping them open. Those aren't identical.
I doubt he'd have written what he wrote without checking into this issue, so, just a guess, but perhaps it comes down to something like: A) closing schools didn't reduce deadly or serious covid cases by all that much* (children are less susceptible to covid, after all) and, B) there are lots of second order effects flowing from school closures that were likely harmful, and in some cases are associated with increased mortality (more violent crime, more substance abuse, more domestic violence flowing from parental stress, additional unemployment and thus more loss of health insurance, etc).
*Also, there's an argument to be made that the problem wasn't so much closing schools as keeping them closed too long, well after diminishing returns had set in.
Of course this assumes the next pandemic won’t be more deadly for children to catch than for adults. But in the past, there have been diseases that were worse for children than for adults… and in those cases, closing schools would likely be safer for kids than keeping them open.
Good points.
I found much of the discussion on this topic to be pretending that we knew kids arent spreading it or pretending that we knew it was harmful to have remote schooling because we didnt want to talk about inconvenient it was to suddenly shift to home schooling.
Similar to many executives who wanted to loudly insist that working from home was hurting their workers and the companies profitability. But the data indicated that workers were fine and profits were rising and the real reasons that we have to come back to the office were often unspoken.
Exactly.
Schools were a serious problem. Children got COVID just fine. They spread it just fine. They just didn't have a lot of symptoms, so you couldn't tell which kids was spreading it.
(The public schools I attended had weirdly high ceilings. Teachers were required to keep the upper windows partly open all year round, and they had to use long poles with hooks to open those windows. I asked once, and found out that those were anti-tuberculosis measures.)
The older parts of my high school were built like that, but I never knew why!
I suspect it is more that there isn't any good solution for dealing with contagion in schools. A pile of kids, especially small ones, in one room is a petri dish. Then you send them home to infect the family.
To the extent you let kids physically interact with one another, there isn't much of a fix. Sure, if you can find the money, fix ventilation, tack up UV lights, etc. It will help if you get it right.
But I don't think there is a general solution that doesn't involve sufficient distance to ensure you're not breathing the same air.
I think it's more a tacit weighing of costs and benefits. Schools are very, very important. Movies, concerts, church choir practices, etc.--these things may be fun (ymmv), but they aren't societally important.
(I'm not weighing in on the goodness or badness of Kevin's schools proposition--just pointing out that there's a reason that we might hesitate to close schools over other public indoor gatherings)
Kevin specifically cites the greater "safety" of keeping schools open (as opposed to closing them).
Yea, back during 9/11 I was working near Wall St... the EPA told us all to go back to work the following Monday, insisting it was totally safe. Oh, and also if we didn't the economy would collapse.
I always assumed these "studies" insisting that schools somehow magically warp the time space continuum and are actually *safe* places for kids to pile together were the exact same thing. An economic necessity. I mean look, you're not an awful parent putting your kid in harms way and bringing illness back to your family... it's totally safe! Now get back to work and pay your rent!
I would say the most important thing we can do is elect Democrats, to reduce the odds that, when the next pandemic arrives, the Destroy America party will be in charge.
I think the "Kevin is fighting the last war" comments are off. Yes, of course we can't assume the next new virus will exhibit attributes identical to SARS‑CoV‑2. It may well be quite different.
But that hardly means there are no lessons likely to be applicable to the next pandemic.
Wait, it is OK to keep crowded schools open, but we have to close crowded theaters and restaurants? Have any of you ever been in actual schools? They tend to be far more crowded than these other places that must be closed next time. Here in the Great Northeast there are many in buildings 100 years old. Ventilation, if you are lucky, might mean some windows that open, but only in the summer. Newer buildings don't have opening windows. Counting on any school administration to install, maintain, and properly use advanced ventilation is hopeless. Our local high school ventilation failed one hot spring and instead of allowing students to eat outside they were forced to sit in a cafeteria with temperatures over 100 degrees. This went on for weeks until someone reported the school to the state authorities. In any case, what about the teachers? Even if the students survive, how many teachers are we willing to let die? My wife left her preschool and survived, but I have no doubt she wouldn't have done so well if she had stayed. Almost no preschooler is capable of wearing masks properly, and they are constantly sneezing, coughing, and worse on each other and the teachers. Hopeless to prevent disease in that situation, and once my wife left we immediately noticed the absence of constant colds, flu, and other stuff that routinely came home from school.
My formula for preparing for the next pandemic:
1. Universal healthcare
2. Free quality masks available for everyone and mandatory masking inside every school, business, and government building.
3. Mandatory pandemic training and planning for every school, business, and government.
4. Mandatory vaccination once the vaccine is available, and no bullshit exemptions for religion or other nonsense. You have to go to a government health department to get an exemption for legitimate health reasons.
Oh yeah, we can't know the next pandemic is going to be the same at all. Some bugs are very, very transmissible via surfaces, unlike what Covid turned out to be. That right there jumped out at me.
Take a look at the Wikipedia page for Norovirus too, with such gems as "they are extremely contagious, and fewer than twenty virus particles can cause an infection[15] (some research suggests as few as five).[16] Transmission can be aerosolized when those stricken with the illness vomit, and can be aerosolized by a toilet flush when vomit or diarrhea is present; infection can follow eating food or breathing air near an episode of vomiting, even if cleaned up" etc. That's not Covid at all (and would change much of our reactions, such as putting kids in schools anyway). Who knows what the next one will be like?
Good points above but another...Be realistic about threats and try to serve the communities most threatened.
Post vaccines, the threats to children were astronomically small. Yet my liberal friends demanded school stay closed until what...the threat was zero? That was a political disaster for us as they either had no kids or could telecommute while working class people were left scrambling. Make allowances for staff with health issues but otherwise the response needs to commensurate with the threat for different communities.
Once the virus escaped and cycled through the population we were all going to get it eventually. I know only two people who have not had covid and they are frankly a little nuts. But they will get it just like they will get (have gotten) the flu. So I thought the CDC should have publicly outlined what an 'end' would look like (mass vaccination/infection), and I suspect they could have projected it with their models and rates of spread. The sense that the CDC and other entities were going to keep threat response at maximum indefinitely did more harm than good.
I don't know what happened in other places, but here the minute they opened the schools cases skyrocketed, the hospital reported they were at capacity and started shipping patients away to other locations, and people I knew that had avoided it suddenly came down with COVID, including my wife. Businesses closed left and right due to lack of available staff. In short, the worst part of the pandemic locally was right after the schools opened. COVID went right through my office.
We had a similar experience but in our larger school district of ~4000 students, no students or staff died from COVID contracted during 'in school' periods.
Perhaps the the solution is to creatively open schools so that spread is 'spread out' overtime? Have grades come back on different days, and then broadcast that this is happening so that hospitals do not get overwhelmed. Or open districts at different times so that local hospitals are not overwhelmed.
But if the solution is create a zero risk situation by closing schools indefinitely, then we should prepare to lose every election from now until eternity. My apolitical working class neighbor was ready for the revolution when the schools here announced another semester of closure.
How interesting. Because inside of the school I work in, there appeared to be no transmission between the kids or between kids and teachers. Of course, everyone here was masked.
Sure, kids got covid, but the other kids sitting near them wouldn't. The teachers I talked to who had covid mostly got it at family holiday get-togethers. Despite being exposed to 500 kids each week, my kids and I didn't get covid until we went on a Summer vacation to an indoor Waterpark (no masks in there).
School covid cases moved through sports teams and siblings, not the kids sitting at the same table in math class.
Yeah, we had our big surge during Homecoming Week at the high school. Everyone was out partying and getting COVID. Luckily, the hospital managed to add a few ICU units, so we only had a few deaths.
The guidance here excludes one glaring omission. Preparation for immediate attention to those age 65 an older. Through March 1st 2023, 75% of covid deaths were those 65 and older. (That is, about 840,000 of the 1.1 million dead to date.) To what extent olds were responsible for wider spread to the general public, I don't know, but it's clear this age group will likely be at greatest risk again for catching the disease when the next pandemic happens. I'd think Medicare should be much better prepared to provide immediate intervention for its beneficiaries next time.
Good point! Medicare should send quality masks to everyone over 65. They can be used to protect people during flu season too, even if COVID isn't around. I am in that demographic and among my friends there has been a notable reduction in the usual flus and colds, to the point that many are still wearing masks when out and about in shops, etc. Another thing that needs to be done is IT support and assistance so that older folks can communicate and stay in touch with loved ones and others via the Internet. Also great for ordering food, medicine, etc.
In general, health care capacity and responsiveness was inadequate during the pandemic years. This lack of capacity surely hit older people harder. It was at times impossible to get a call through to a doctor. Online scheduling was flaky and overly complex. And clinics were often closed, presumably, because of staffing shortages. Under normal circumstance, I'd say our health care system seems to be efficient and available within a reasonable time frame. But it has no contingency plan for a global emergency to ramp up availability when it's needed most.
Remember when we could finally get vaccines and the only way to do so was to make an appointment online? It required reasonable computer skills and infinite patience. I managed to get my wife and father in by rising in the middle of the night and doing it at ungodly hours, but it was totally beyond the ability of many people. I helped many people find appointments. Not everyone is comfortable or able to do things online.
Things we should be doing now:
0. As Kevin's plus
1. Make adult vaccinations (flu, pneumonia, etc) routine for everyone - builds capability and establishes the norm.
2. Normalise coughing into elbow instead of hand.
3. Normalise mask wearing when sick.
4. Resolve issues around automated (app-based?) contact tracing.
5. Schools should have pandemic response plans - if remote learning is necessary, how to minimise contact between students if not (in particular, high school students having different classes with different groups and all moving around small corridors together is probably not worth the benefits during a pandemic).
6. Businesses too, as above.
7. Include benefits in possible pandemics to routine cost-benefit analysis (e.g. would air-conditioning schools improve student performance enough to justify the cost? What if we also consider improved ventilation benefits in pandemics? Or: Does the risk of nuclear or gas attack justify issuing gas masks to the general population? Does that change given that they'd also be useful in pandemics?)
Things I don't entirely agree with Kevin on:
1. Cleaning hands less - that's partially about the details of COVID. We won't know in the moment that its not useful, so we should still do it. NB: Hopefully widespread far-UV will mostly take care of cleaning surfaces.
While I believe HVAC inline UV makes sense, it's not entirely clear that far-UV won't have accidental unintended consequences of wiping out the good bacteria and viruses.
And I seriously doubt any epidemiologists would agree with less emphasis on hand-washing.
Also, you are hardly the first to write up about this. See:
(1) https://www.healthaction.org/pandemic-preparedness-playbook
(2) https://www.cfr.org/article/world-still-hasnt-agreed-pandemic-playbook
(3) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.838561/full
In a rough way, this mimics the adage that science advances one dead scholar at a time. I can see where new structures have to come up to call it COVID code but older ones do not because of cost issues. Not optimal, but in one hundred years, how many non-COVID-compliant buildings are still standing?
If we're going to require masks, we need to require high quality masks. At least surgical quality. Unfortunately, after this pandemic, I'm not sure we could ever get enough compliance to make it work. Which is a pity, it really is a very easy mitigation.
Before the next pandemic, we should also really work on mask R&D -- quicker, easier production, better fitting, more comfortable masks, masks that are harder to wear improperly, masks that don't fog your glasses.
"Encourage outdoor seating at restaurants and, where possible, allow it to happen with a minimum of red tape."
In the areas I travelled, it seemed like this happened about as swiftly and aggressively as it reasonably could have.
It probably would have helped if we'd gotten the message that the outdoors were basically fine earlier and more clearly (as you mentioned in an earlier point.)
School policy is one area in which we should definitely not take lessons from covid. Most pandemic or epidemic diseases hit the old and the young hardest with less effect on those in between. Covid's pattern of being almost harmless to the young is very much an outlier and the probability of the next pandemic acting the same way is low.
I'm a dance organizer. We wasted many unhappy hours debating what our COVID policy should be, because no public authority provided guidance. They still don't. We're completely unqualified to make public health policy, but we have to. Even "no restrictions" is a policy. We require masks and some vaccination. This summer, we'll revisit what's necessary and waste another dozen hours in circular conversation about things we don't know, because no authority is providing a standard - though I do appreciate the data from the CDC.
Next time (and this time!), I want state or federal health authorities to provide concrete suggestions on what is "safe enough" for public events. It doesn't have to be perfect or mandatory; just clear.
Was always a bit mystified about how badly Trump whiffed the pandemic -- especially given his obvious insecurity/obsession with being seen as "strong", a "savior" -- and, according to Maggie Haberman -- a weird thing for being compared to Superman. (She says that when he got Covid his original plan was to emerge from Bethesda Naval Hospital and tear off his shirt revealing a Superman shirt underneath. He was talked out of that idea, she says.)... I mean, for a politician, what is easier than mailing out masks and hand sanitizer to everybody, then going around the country shaking hands with governors and mayors as they accept the stuff? This is "leadership" 101.
Thus my point: obviously we should have stockpiles of masks and hand sanitizer. And maybe some sort of home air filters. I don't get the political obsession with whether this stuff is made in China or here in the US. Buy it from China and stockpile it here in warehouses. Tax corporations that do international business to pay for this since this is the most basic kind of "externality" they ask us regular folks to pay for, but which is actually caused by all of their globetrotting to find cheap labor.
Three points
1. Improve public spaces. For example, public schools, under one of the Covid relief plans, received large sums of money (it averaged $1.6 million per school). Unfortunately, few school utilized the money to modernize their HVAC systems. Increased interior air flow, better filters, and open windows, reduce the risk of transmission in interior spaces.
2. Focus significant energy on your high risk groupings, such as senior homes. I am not quick to compliment DeSantis, but on this point he was correct: in contrast, Cuomo moved ill folks back into senior homes, with tragic effect.
3. Build public trust. Yes, I know lots of the GOP is nutty. But I also know, some of the communication (masks don't work etc) was bad and hindered trust.
One thing we should do is streamline and unclog government pandemic response in the US. Initial US handling of covid testing was terrible. Only the CDC was allowed to develop PCR tests and they proved not to be up to the task. Many labs and companies could have developed PCR tests themselves but regulations prevented them from doing so.
Our frameworks for providing research funding are pretty much optimally bad for responding to urgent, rapidly changing situations. Our lab started sequencing SARS-CoV-2 genomes quickly in early 2020 but we had to stop (during the summer, I think) because we ran out of funds on hand. We applied for NIH funding but our grant application wasn't even considered until February 2021. That's just nuts.
Many, many people have pointed out the stupidity of the cycle of US funding for public health. We chronically starve public health agencies, panic when there is a public health crisis and start throwing wads of money at understaffed agencies, and then lose interest and fail even to deliver on promised funds, much less provide sustained funding for robust public health capacity.
Prepare people to understand that there will probably be uncertainty as the new pandemic starts, but that shouldn't lead to cynicism about the science.
Robotic transport will have a transformative effect on any future pandemic. During COVID a hard lockdown was never achieved because people still had to go to the grocery store. This was the Achilles heal of the COVID countermeasure. This helped to maintain a viral reservoir in the community.
However, with the robbobuggies for delivery from Starship this will never be true again. Without having to go to the supermarket for food items (or other forms of shopping), a hard lockdown could be imposed for 2 weeks and the viral reservoir could be eliminated during a single cycle. Ideally this could be coordinated on a global scale and a virus could be entirely eliminated over a single viral cycle. Now that people are aware of the multi-year consequences of never achieving an absolute lockdown, they would be more than willing to accept a 2 week inconvenience over a prolonged cessation of social life to cope with an emerging viral illness.
One thing that is rarely mentioned, if ever, is to restrict international travel - basically just shut it down. This would help in controlling the spread.
Look to where we failed last time.
1. We did not have enough PPE in storage, and a lot of what was there had dry rotted. We have to maintain usable stocks. This has to be done at multiple levels, i.e. the gov't keeps stocks, manufacturers keep stocks, hospitals keep stocks, etc... Also note, we went through a lot of those stocks much faster than anyone anticipated, so that has to be taken into account.
2. Limited to no capacity to ramp up production. This is a multifaceted problem.
A. Everyone assumed they could just order more stuff from China--that is they assumed any problem would be regional, not a true pandemic.
B. Some US suppliers wanted to ramp up--but needed guarantees that they would not be left holding the bag should the crises blow over quickly. We need to be able to support companies that maintain the ability to ramp up production, e.g. they'll still have to pay property tax on equipment they are not using. We need to support the workers they'll have to bring in to run the equipment so they'll still have jobs after the crises is over. Maybe treat it as though they are being called up by the National Guard. And we'll need to secure supply chains, and stockpile critical supplies too. Again, can't assume you can just buy things from China.
3. The development and production of vaccines worked surprisingly well. In this case, throwing money at the problem worked. And, we were incredibly lucky. We need to focus on making heat stable mRNA vaccines, and look at bottle necks, e.g. vials. We also need to study other viruses that may trigger pandemics and find ways to develop vaccines against them quickly.
While I'm not a doctor, I think that when you said de-emphasize "cleaning hands and surfaces," you assumed that any new pandemic will be with a virus that is spread only through aerosol means, like COVID. But not all viruses are spread only that way. As I understand it, many ARE spread by touching infected surfaces (i.e., fomites). So I think this depends on the virus and the significant modes of spread.
All great Kevin but I would like to add. Leaving a phone number for contact in case someone at the restaurant tests positive. This is what they did in Canada, well, parts of Canada and no one complained.
These two things are straight-up incompatible with each other. Has Kevin BEEN to a school in the past half-century? It's literally nothing but sitting down insides near an enormous number of people!
If Kevin means by proper safeguards "we'll only have like ten people in classrooms and cafeterias and gyms and whatnot will be shut down" then this is functionally equivalent to closing schools for most people.
I'm gonna be blunt; the biggest thing we need to do to plan is how to break the plague rats. That's going to be more important than any other form of planning. Whatever procedures that might or might not need to be done to mitigate a different pandemic (which might have different characteristics from COVID) any and all of them, from the mildest to the most severe, will be resisted by a giant army of angry plague rats who affirmatively decide they're on the side of the virus.
Any effective planning for another pandemic will run afoul of this. It doesn't matter how good your plan is if you try and implement it and a punch of plague rats decide "fuck you." The first step in any plan has to be "what are we going to do break the plague rats when they rise up?"
If you don't have a plan for that you don't have a plan.