The hidden gift in this pandemic is that we learn how to prepare for the worse one still to come

Second thought. The hidden gift in this pandemic is that this isn’t the most terrible one, the next one or some other one down the road is. This is the one where we learn how to handle that coming pandemic. We are well into the age of global contagions but this is the first time we fully noticed, stopped short, actually reordered our country to fight it.

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This is when we learn what worked, what decision made it better or worse, what stockpiles are needed, what can be warehoused, where research dollars must be targeted.

We’re on a shakedown cruise. Knowledge of how to handle a coming, more difficult pandemic is being gained now, by all of us.

People have asked about great speeches for hard moments. There are many. Here is Elizabeth I at Tilbury, England, in August 1588. The very existence of her nation was under challenge; her people needed faith in their leader. She waded into a crowd of common people saying she’d been told not to but she would never fear them, they were blood of her blood. Extemporaneously: “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too.”

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