But domestically, many public-health experts, historians, and legal scholars worry that the U.S. is lapsing into neglect, that the temporary wave of investments isn’t being channeled into the right areas, and that COVID-19 might actually leave the U.S. weaker against whatever emerges next. Donald Trump’s egregious mismanagement made it easy to believe that events would have played out differently with a halfway-competent commander who executed preexisting pandemic plans. But that ignores the many vulnerabilities that would have made the U.S. brittle under any administration. Even without Trump, “we’d still have been in a whole lot of trouble,” Gregg Gonsalves, a global-health activist and an epidemiologist at Yale, told me. “The weaknesses were in the rootstock, not high up in the trees.”

The panic-neglect cycle is not inevitable but demands recognition and resistance. “A pandemic is a course correction to the trajectory of civilization,” Alex de Waal, of Tufts University and the author of New Pandemics, Old Politics, told me. “Historical pandemics challenged us to make some fairly fundamental changes to the way in which society is organized.” Just as cholera forced our cities to be rebuilt for sanitation, COVID-19 should make us rethink the way we ventilate our buildings, as my colleague Sarah Zhang argued. But beyond overhauling its physical infrastructure, the U.S. must also address its deep social weaknesses—a health-care system that millions can’t access, a public-health system that’s been rotting for decades, and extreme inequities that leave large swaths of society susceptible to a new virus.

Early last year, some experts suggested to me that America’s COVID-19 failure stemmed from its modern inexperience with infectious disease; having now been tested, it might do better next time. But preparedness doesn’t come automatically, and neither does its absence. “Katrina didn’t happen because Louisiana never had a hurricane before; it happened because of policy choices that led to catastrophe,” Gonsalves said. The arc of history does not automatically bend toward preparedness. It must be bent.