Like most people at the beginning of 2020, I was minding my own business, doing my job, and planning for the future. Life was good.

I had rarely thought about what public health bureaucracies have, or should have, the power to do. I naively believed that agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were supposed to investigate causes of disease and report their findings, leaving it to state and local governments to decide what actions to take. I assumed that CDC was a benign example of “good government.”

Then came reports of a virus that was supposedly ravaging a Chinese city that I had never heard of. Would it come here? What would we do if it did? Hadn’t China dealt with this kind of thing in the past?