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the Finally, there's each of us. It can be hard to feel like you have any ability to affect the course of a pandemic. A mysterious new disease is frightening, and it can also be frustrating, because it seems like we have so little power to do anything about it. But there are things each of us can do. Elect leaders who will take pandemics seriously and make good, science-based decisions when the time comes. Follow their advice about masking up, staying home, and keeping your distance when you're out. Get vaccinated when you can. Get your information regarding public health practices from reliable sources such as the WHO and national public health agencies such as the CDC in the United States and it's equivalent in other countries. Avoid destructive disinformation and misinformation that we often find flooding social media. Most of all, once COVID is no longer an acute threat, don't forget about what it has done. Do whatever you can to keep pandemics on the agenda--locally, nationally, internationally--so we can break the cycle of panic and neglect that makes them the most important thing in the world for a time, until we forget about them and go back to our daily lives. We're all eager to return to the way things were before, but there is one thing we cannot afford to go back to--our complacency about pandemics. We don't need to live in fear of another global catastrophe. But we do need to be aware of the possibility and willing to do something about it. The fact that we now understand the threat like never before should inspire the world to take action--to invest billions now so we won't lose millions of lives and trillions of dollars in the future. This is an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and ensure that no one ever has to live through another disaster like COVID. But we can be even more ambitious than that: We can work toward a world where everyone has a chance at a healthy and productive life. The opposite of complacency isn't fear. It's action.