1. Solve twenty-first century challenges with twenty-first century technology: Virtually every government mounting an effective response to the pandemic—including South Korea, Estonia, Taiwan, and New Zealand—powers their institutions with world-class digital infrastructure. We need to learn from these examples. Citizens should have access to secure data wallets that provide individuals with ownership and control of their information and records. The right tech can streamline access to services, facilitate contact tracing, and allow for more rapid recovery from future disasters.
2. Ensure universal access to basic digital services: It is almost impossible to participate fully in society without access to digital platforms. The pandemic has further exacerbated the inequalities that flow from disparities in connectivity. An expanded twenty-first century social safety net should include universal access to: 1) high-speed, low-cost internet; 2) a basic laptop or tablet to get online; and 3) foundational digital government and financial services.
3. Build open source to expedite digital crisis response: Governments should leverage the power of open source software to share innovations with other communities around the world. Open source allows governments to pool resources and quickly replicate digital services from other jurisdictions rather than building from scratch. Adopting world-class systems that have already been tested and implemented in other settings should form the foundation of a global digital response to future crises.
4. Foster options to reinforce resilience: Providing citizens with multiple paths to access vital services creates safeguards when things go wrong. From low-cost telemedicine as a fallback when in-person care is unavailable to digital and mail-in balloting to supplement in-person voting, the principle of optionality should apply to all essential services.
5. Avoid trading efficiency for fragility: Prior to the pandemic, organizations in almost all sectors prioritized efficiency at any cost. The pandemic exposed the weaknesses of systems optimized for airtight “just-in-time” delivery as supply chain failures caused cascading shortages for everything from test kits to meat. Policymakers must build redundancy to reduce risk. Institutions and firms should adopt digital procurement systems that rely on blockchain traceability to manage supply chain risk and build stockpiles and surge capacity.
6. To build resilience, remember that staffing is policy: The United States needs a cabinet-level chief risk officer to define a national strategy around risk-sharing and preparedness. We should also create a preparedness accelerator that can develop and scale solutions to future crises, an early alert system to monitor potential threats, and a resilience reserve corps to inject qualified responders into communities in need.
7. Help families get back on their feet: Many households will experience financial setbacks that last far beyond lockdowns and quarantines. Public institutions must redesign their work to help individuals weather these hardships. Measures that could help include debt forgiveness for students emerging from college and those struggling to find employment, healthcare cost waivers to ensure access to testing and treatment during the pandemic, and credit scoring resets to help guarantee that those who fall on hard times during this crisis are not saddled with an added burden when rebuilding their lives in years to come.

The speed with which the COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy and so-called fortress nations to their knees, buckled healthcare systems, and crushed carefully conceived response plans should prompt deep societal reflection. When the pandemic finally clears and nations tally the human and economic toll of this crisis, one certainty will be a long list of lost lives and livelihoods. The central task now is to ensure that the sacrifices of once hidden heroes in the medical, scientific and educational communities and the trillions in national treasure spent in the heat of battle on recovery efforts will not be squandered. To realize that goal, any post-pandemic response and recovery plan must produce a better world.

Great crises often lay the groundwork for great reforms. Just as the incalculable toll of World War II gave birth to new international institutions with the twin charges of keeping the peace and ensuring that a rules-based economic system spread prosperity around the world, this crisis will give rise to new solutions and institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic will infect and affect millions of people, claim hundreds of thousands of lives, and cost trillions of dollars. This is a collective sacrifice that cannot be in vain. Along these lines, a new study has shown that lockdown efforts, while piecemeal across the country, may have averted 60 million cases. Global crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic that began in Wuhan, China and in a matter of five months affected more than 188 countries, proving that viruses, like vector-borne diseases and vile ideologies that span the globe, do not respect national borders. Except this time around, rather than coalitions of countries fighting together, like the post-war rules-based system would dictate, including via the guidance of multilateral health bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO), countries have taken the fight to the invisible threat all alone.

Politicizing the response to the pandemic, even in its earliest days, greatly hindered the world’s ability to mount a credible testing, containment, mitigation, and recovery strategy. Instead of following the guidance of public health officials and epidemiological experts, many countries adopted a zero-sum approach, introducing “beggar-thy-neighbor” healthcare responses while resurrecting national border controls not seen in a hundred years.

Indeed, European countries all but shredded the Schengen agreement that was first introduced in 1985 to enable the free flow of people and commerce across 26 European nations. In the United States, as the pandemic’s epicenter moved from a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, where it was first spotted, to New York, to elsewhere across the country, neighboring states erected de facto barriers of their own. In Rhode Island, for example, police and National Guard units were deployed at the border with New York to check travelers and enforce mandatory 14-day quarantines. The home of the free and brave became the home of the quarantined and cowed as strict social distancing rules defined a surreal new normal. Tellingly, for the first time in history, all 50 U.S. states and territories were under disaster declarations.

As much as the coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to its knees, it has also revealed a number of areas where the fate of the planet, countries, and perhaps humanity is intertwined. Amid a rising tide of economic nationalism and populist sentiments that predated the outbreak, the world faced a threat that does not respect traditional forms of perceived strength any more than it recognizes wealth, religion, creed, or political allegiance. It has fractured societies and alliances, but the pandemic could yet emerge as a unifying force to the extent it reminds us of our common frailty, interdependence, and utter lack of preparedness for complex emerging threats. With the impact of climate change looming on the horizon, the pandemic might be humanity’s last best hope to develop a more coordinated global approach to other major societal risks.

Some claim—wrongly—that the pandemic’s disruptive consequences were unpredictable. Like other great crises, the coronavirus itself did not break the global economy, national healthcare systems, or response capabilities. Rather, it revealed areas that were already broken.

The pandemic also revealed that much of the new fatalism regarding population scale technology platforms may have missed the mark. Notwithstanding the real and troubling flaws that exist in many technology platforms, technology, when universally deployed, can not only level the playing field, it can help ensure business, operational, educational, and governmental continuity in the face of major disruptions. The video conferencing services that kept millions of students in virtual classrooms also kept a few cylinders of the global economy turning. The absence of universal hardware, software, and internet connectivity across a range of essential systems, from education, to banking, healthcare, elections, and payments, proved to be a real hindrance in pandemic response and recovery efforts.

Some countries have clearly used the pandemic as an excuse to exploit technology and violate human rights. However, overall, technology has proven to be a force for good through this crisis. From crowdsourcing data feeds that aggregated the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases around the world, often with detailed geographical accuracy at county or city levels, to 3D-printed essential medical equipment for frontline healthcare providers, the ability to pivot supply chains from lean, global, and just-in-time (which proved to be more tightly strung than a Stradivarius violin), to hyper-local sourcing, has been key in this battle.

Indeed, the absence of anything close to an adequate strategic global stockpile of ventilators, personal protective equipment (PPE) and N95 masks (all items that were subject to national and private sector hoarding, price gouging, and health security arbitrage), turned an already calamitous event into a template for human, governance, and market failure. Many countries, including the United States, resorted to wartime powers to shift their industrial base away from routine production toward manufacturing hand sanitizer, protective equipment, and other medical gear that was in short supply.

For the vulnerable sectors of the world’s population that did not succumb to the virus while undergoing medical care, sadly far too many perished for what will be proven to be a preventable loss due to the shortage of basic medical supplies and hospital beds per capita. Others, such as the financially vulnerable and minority communities, have proven to have higher mortality rates for obvious reasons. Their need to subsist through exposed jobs, along with underlying health and lifestyle issues, exposed a two-tier medical system.

Having already pledged trillions of dollars in direct aid to U.S. citizens through tax deferments, loans, and corporate bailouts of vulnerable sectors—ostensibly the largest non-war economic recovery package in world history—we must now pledge to use this societal down payment to build more resilient institutions and a more resilient country. To that end, this white paper is designed to serve as a blueprint for renovating areas of our public infrastructure that have not fared well amid the pandemic. Given the depth of the rot in so many of our institutions and systems, the crisis presents an opportunity to not only rebuild, but to emerge better off, with a heightened ability to address the challenges on our long national horizon.

What began as a medical and epidemiological event with the spread of COVID-19 in the United States rapidly bled into a household economy and personal financial crisis. The pandemic merely revealed what Americans already knew: far too many people in the country are living paycheck to paycheck. Millions are barely able to make ends meet, struggling to grasp the stability that Americans enjoyed one generation ago but seems fleeting today.

In a recent study that created an index to track the cost of thriving, researchers found that the middle class has to work a daunting 66 weeks a year for women and 53 for men with median household income—out of a 52-week work year—to provide for basic overhead, healthcare protection and costs of living. Thirty-five years ago, these same basic benefits required between 30 and 45 weeks of work, at which point the remainder of earnings could be deployed to savings (a key ingredient in economic resilience), education, real estate, and time off.

What the risk and resilience community refer to as liquid asset poverty, or simply cash poor, is a harsh reality for far too many Americans. According to a survey by the Federal Reserve, 40 percent of the population pre-pandemic could not afford a $400 financial setback without tapping credit. Some are often dismissive of credit indebtedness in the United States as a sign of people’s spendthrift, materialistic tendencies, as hordes of people trample over each other on Black Friday. The sum of these consumption patterns produces an eye-watering $14 trillion in consumer debt. The real debt burden under which millions of Americans labor is the $1.5 trillion of student debt, which was once an economic down payment their forebears could make for social mobility and economic security. Neither social mobility nor economic security were guaranteed before the pandemic; they are further imperiled now. At root, restarting the economic mobility engine in the United States requires the creation of a vibrant middle class and a business operating model where companies can compete in the world market, while advancing standards of living at home.

The pathways to the middle class seem blocked at every turn or the tollbooth fee at each off ramp to white picket fences, a house, dog, decent employment, and retirement savings seems to be cost-prohibitive for far too many people. In an environment where the labor force participation rate has been falling since 2000, a global health threat as serious as COVID-19 was liable to push millions of people over the financial brink. In just three months since the crisis began, one in four American workers have filed for unemployment protection. In order to remedy this, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s proposed solution was the unprecedented use of direct payments to everyone in the United States of $1,200, in addition to other measures under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) to shore up the economy beginning at the household level.

These extraordinary measures put a spotlight on basic social security levels, healthcare access and unemployment benefits for all sectors of the economy. In an incredible volte-face, the once vulnerable gig economic freelancing side hustlers for delivery and livery platforms, had more personal resilience for a short time than other sectors of the employment spectrum. Hard hit sectors, including travel, hospitality, restaurants, and in-person retail, collectively laid off 40 million workers in the first ten weeks of the crisis. In all, jobless claims in the United States rose to 26 percent of the workforce, making up the largest number of unemployed people as a share of the U.S. population since the Great Depression. Indeed, we can liken the global economic consequences of the pandemic to a “Great Correction,” as the societal costs of systemic income inequality, eroding competitiveness, and social mobility, along with a tattered safety net, are tallied.

Not only did the pandemic shatter the longest bull run on Wall Street lasting more than 132 months, it hurt Main Street with equal force, grinding the United States and global economy to a halt as social distancing and strict quarantine measures took effect. The strict economic definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of no growth. Two consecutive quarters of no economic activity at all, a veritable flatlining of the U.S. economy, prompted a rare moment of bi-partisanship in Washington as the CARES Act was passed, along with further stimulus of $484 billion for small businesses with the expansion of the Payroll Protection Program (PPP). This Act provides relief across a range of areas, in all totaling more than $2.4 trillion. Borrowing from the insurance principles of the law of large numbers and indemnification, where insureds are made whole after a loss, recuperating this investment, which will forestall many retirements, educational, personal, and professional aspirations, will require strategic long-range thinking.

To begin with, we must reconsider what levels of standardized healthcare, unemployment, and paid medical leave options are made available to every U.S. citizen. Having nearly 29 million people who were uninsured, notwithstanding historically low unemployment and under-employment numbers, meant that the pandemic lockdown did not have to push very hard or for very long against the American household and businesses before they were pushed to the brink. Indeed, this explains the false choice millions of people faced in the United States and around the world between adhering to public health advice on self-isolation and social distancing, while bearing the risk of financial ruin because of the absence of paid medical leave policies either at the national or individual company level.¹ Like all insurance structures, it is prudent to pre-fund expected losses in the future thus creating a financial pool to draw down, rather than funding these costs ad hoc or not funding them at all.

While improvements in household and personal economy depend on a range of variables, including U.S. economic competitiveness, minimum wage and protection standards, among others, the pandemic revealed just how vulnerable we are as a society due to the fleeting American dream.

In the chain of community resilience, we are as strong as the weakest link. Each link is a person or household in a community and far too many people in the United States are living near the financial brink or at subsistence levels. More than 53 percent of U.S. households do not have an emergency savings account. This is exacerbated in times of crisis, irrespective of the cause. Whether a natural disaster, flood, hurricane, tornado, fire, or pandemic causes the turmoil, households are not adequately prepared—neither at the net savings level or with regard to insurance or other forms of third-party protection.

This is where community resilience begins to break down. The financial system is cruelest and costliest to the people who can least afford it. In addition to pernicious rates of unbanked and underbanked households, numbering more than 32 million in the United States, there are also insidious rates of underinsurance against mathematically certain risks. This is especially true in high-hazard areas, where low-income families live in low-lying areas in low-quality homes, a triple threat. Exacerbating the low levels of resilience, these very communities are among the least insured, which is saying a lot for a nation whose safety net and disaster recovery capabilities are wantonly ineffective in the face of a worsening threat landscape.

Herein, the insurance or underinsurance gap is a wide chasm of financial vulnerability, where the cost of risk crosses all lines of defense landing squarely on the taxpayer. Bridging this protection gap would have immediate benefits in not only protecting households and community coffers, but in shielding the public balance sheet, which is all too often first in line. This is partly a market failure when it comes to penetration, affordability, and value derived from private insurance and partly a failure of public insurance programs that labor under upside down actuarial models as much as they promote moral hazards—risk taking behavior without enduring the consequences.

Bridging this gap is a key part of improving community resilience and the ability at the household level to spring back from catastrophic events, whether these are caused by natural, man-made or emerging threats. The run up of mega, multi-billion dollar disasters in the last 20 years suggests the national trend line of declared disasters augurs a perilous new world. It should also augur a new definition of community resilience. In the past 20 years, the rate of U.S. disaster declarations (assuming no politicization of the process), has gone up exponentially, averaging 124 per year. In the preceding 50 years up to the year 2000, the national annual average was just 24. In the pandemic, the nation’s map was flashing red, as all 50 states and territories declared “blue sky” disasters. In this environment, having the private insurance balance sheet in retreat, amidst perilously low levels of insurance uptake while the waters are rising, the winds and fires are raging, exposes fissures in community resilience.²

Tragically, entire communities are being wiped off the map or etched with the effects of climate change, economic degradation, and reduced productivity and competitiveness—all amplified by the pandemic—triggering a wave of human displacement. The town of Paradise, California, was obliterated in the 2018 Camp Fire event. The entirety of Puerto Rico’s public infrastructure—with the bankrupt public utility, PREPA, being the chief culprit—was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017, setting the U.S. territory back decades in terms of economic recovery. Puerto Rico’s disaster-displaced residents went to all 50 states, in what the international humanitarian community would characterize as internally displaced people (IDPs). The COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened these underlying economic vulnerabilities, where the hardest hit communities and people are those who were already economically marginalized.

With trillions of dollars of economic intervention and foregone economic productivity already on the table as a down payment on the future, the post-pandemic United States must address underlying community challenges in an agnostic manner to the threat environment. All-hazards management of threats that can impact communities would strengthen all of the fibers, threads, and weaving patterns that make up the community safety net. This net was already in tatters before the pandemic and it is now in desperate need of mending.

Communities facing annualized threats, such as flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and earthquakes, are all woefully underinsured or uninsured against these risks. When Hurricane Harvey turned the city of Houston into a lake creating a citizen flotilla to rescue neighbors, as many as 80 percent of households in the path of the hurricane lacked flood insurance. When Hurricane Maria sent Puerto Rico back to the proverbial dark ages, triggering the second longest blackout in modern history (surpassed by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013), 79 percent of public assistance claims were denied or unanswered because of inadequate documentation. Only 13 percent of California households have adequate earthquake insurance, notwithstanding the ever-present risk that the big one might strike at any time. Indeed, as California’s fires have underscored in the last few years, the lines between private sector and public sector risk-sharing have blurred, with PG&E’s bankruptcy ostensibly being the world’s first major corporate failure triggered by climate change.

If our society is ill-equipped to contend with the economic, social and environmental costs of annual events exacerbated by climate change, we would of course seize up in the face of a 100-year pandemic. Resilience, like savings or investments that leverage the financial miracle of compound interest, also accrues. Improving the household economy and financial shock absorption at the community level across the country will improve our ability to withstand all hazards.

The graphic murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who was aided by three of his colleagues, gripped the nation. Floyd, like so many victims of police brutality in the United States, was a Black man who died indiscriminately with a knee on his neck uttering the painful last words “I can’t breathe” and calling out for his mother. This is an all-too-familiar scene on the streets of the United States, where unarmed Black men fall prey to policing tactics borrowed from a militarized urban assault manual, and where Black people appear to be violent threats like foreign enemies on a battlefield here at home.

Unlike so many lives before his, Floyd’s death was not in vain and has sparked a global Black Lives Matter movement that is already seeing a wave of change throughout the country. At the heart of this movement, which triggered record protests (along with civil commotion and a militarized police response) at the height of social distancing, are calls for social justice and equal treatment of Black people in the United States. This should not be a tall order for a country with founding ideals that espouse justice for all, equal rights, and the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. To Black people in the United States, while noble, none of these pursuits come easily courtesy of centuries-old systemic racism that has ossified into the very fabric of U.S. society, the economy, legal treatment, and opportunities for social mobility.

Despite being 13 percent of the population, Black people comprise 33 percent of the prison population—a veritable bookend of a justice system that is as heavy handed in recorded videos of police brutality, as it is in how “justice” is meted out in like-for-like crimes compared to other groups. In economic terms, the accumulation of Black wealth is even more elusive compared to other groups in the United States. The median wealth of Black families is nearly ten times smaller than the wealth of the median white family. Black people are not only systematically excluded from a range of jobs, they are woefully underrepresented in the entire employment pyramid in the country. The ladders of economic mobility for Black people appear to be greased by years of financial exclusion, unfavorable risk rating models, and the rungs of this ladder have been weakened or broken by the others who clambered up first.

The median Black household in the United States earns $10,000 less per annum than the national median household income of $62,626. A major part of how systemic racism rears its head is in the insidious financial exclusion and dependency built into many low-earning frontline jobs. These jobs, sadly, were among the first to go during the first onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. So not only is the Black population more exposed to financial vulnerability that predates the pandemic by centuries, but Black people are also twice as likely to die from COVID-19 when infected. Early data from cities across the United States bears this painful truth, that like many aspects of the Black existence in the United States, the onset of a pandemic would be unfairly weighted against Black people where poverty and unequal access to quality healthcare would be comorbidities.

In terms of access to health insurance or the healthcare system in the form of physical proximity to hospitals or clinics, many Black communities are as deserted by the healthcare system as they are by public education, grocery stores, and other basic community services. Black people are 10 percent more likely to be uninsured or dependent on public assistance programs with periodic access to healthcare as compared to other groups. This much is part of what animates protesters whose rank and file are mercifully as diverse as this great country in a moment of national solidarity that has the power to invoke the type of real change seen in past civil rights movements. The United States, it would seem, errs on the side of gradualism when it comes to social change and justice, and while long, the arc of this country’s spirit bends towards equality.

Something broke in the country with George Floyd’s last words and that so many people would risk their lives is a deep reminder that even in times of crisis America’s motto, e pluribus unum, out of many, one, has deep meaning. Uprooting and short circuiting the causes of systemic racism in the United States that overshadow all aspects of Black reality will require long term commitments akin to those uncovered by truth and reconciliation commissions in post-crisis countries, like South Africa. Until then, hearing and abiding by the basic rallying cry, Black lives matter, is as good a starting point as any for mending a community and mending a nation.

Even before the pandemic raised serious questions about election integrity and continuity in an environment of social distancing, the U.S. electoral process labored under the long shadow of the 2016 presidential election. Adding to the ongoing concerns about cyber vulnerabilities, voter suppression, and disinformation risks, the pandemic underscored how the lack of broad-based electoral options is a vulnerability.

Some state and local elections were postponed in order to help flatten the curve of the outbreak. Others, like Nebraska, Illinois, and Wisconsin, carried on with voting, much to the chagrin of public health officials and national figures. Even before the crisis, the fact that the United States does not enjoy anything close to an omnichannel voting experience that enfranchises citizens and enables votes to be cast and counted using technology, mail-in ballots, and other options was a pre-pandemic vulnerability. The pandemic, however, as with other areas in the U.S. economy, laid bare the difficulty and absurdity of long lines of people waiting to fulfill their civic duty.

Here too, the voting process weighs most heavily on the poor and vulnerable, who often have to endure a loss of productive time at work, may not be able to reach polling stations or are single parents, among other challenges. A recent study analyzed smartphone data to estimate that voters in African American neighborhoods waited 29 percent longer to vote. Secure mail-in ballots or e-voting options to facilitate as wide and participatory a process as possible is not a partisan matter, but a patriotic one. This is also true of overseas voters, the enlisted and the veterans, rural communities, among many others.

Sadly, calls for strengthening election integrity and security have largely gone unheeded since 2016 as the fiercely partisan fights rage on in Washington, D.C. With policymakers mostly focused on airing grievances from past elections, rather than protecting present and future ones, the pandemic proved to be as indiscriminate about political stripes as it is about national borders. The key here, as with other areas outlined in this report, is to increase optionality in the electoral process. Mail in ballots, e-voting, and lengthier voting windows, particularly for vulnerable segments of the population for whom voting is often a hardship, should be the rule, not an exception due to extraordinary circumstances.

It is true that for this optionality to exist nationally, a consensus approach is needed between state election commissions and national political parties. Citizens everywhere should demand a fairer, more secure, and easier electoral process that favors social-distance voting, as much as it does standing in line to cast a physical ballot, should that be a voter’s preference. Doing so will not erode a political party’s odds against their rivals. Rather, it will make electoral outcomes more resonant with the will of all people represented in U.S. society. These models will also enjoy a greater degree of disaster proofing and resilience, since the ability to carry on with elections despite the odds or the challenges of the day, should be a sacrosanct national priority. More voting options across the entire country can make it so.

One of the chief concerns with amplifying voting options is the potential introduction of fraud, miscounting ballots, cybersecurity, or the slow or erroneous tabulation of outcomes. Herein, as with other areas of the post-pandemic recovery, lies an opportunity to mend an already vulnerable system, rather than maintaining status quo. When asked to stand and be counted, whether in an election or a census (noting that the United States conducted a nationwide census in 2020 at the height of the pandemic), technology, optionality, and ease of use are key in driving participation.

High-assurance and privacy preserving digital identity authentication is at the crux of modernizing electoral systems, along with other areas of public-sector digital transformation. The state after all is the entity that gives people their government-issued identities, therefore the state should lead the way in easing the authentication and validation process, especially for key citizen services or areas of civic participation, like voting. Some promising experimentation with privacy preserving digital wallets, as well as other online citizen services examples from around the world offer promise.

The fact that the United States, like many countries around the world, administers a personal identification system that uses unchanging alphanumeric validators such as the social security number, often granted to children at birth, is troubling. This exposes people to the perennial threat of identity theft, which is amplified by the one-sided credit bureau system that monetizes people’s personal financial information, while granting them little control over the access, use, and financial determinations these vast databases empower. The upcoming section on the economy, credit and financial markets will delve a little deeper into how to recalibrate this one-sided issue, where user-controlled identity and personal information access is the key.

• Census Forms
• Ballots in 29 states plus DC
• Tax Forms
• Checks
• Tax Payments
• Identification
• Passports
• Vital Records
• Military Enlistment Forms
• DNA Samples

Improving election security and integrity from a pandemic, a cyberattack or an automated, population scale psyops campaign aimed at distorting public opinion, is a complex endeavor. The lack of optionality or multiple ways of casting a vote makes a flawed, complex system more vulnerable.³

No matter the cause of a mass casualty event, whether it was triggered by a foreign or domestic terrorist attack, a mass shooting, natural disaster, or pandemic, the ability of the healthcare system to address a surge is critical to building resilience. This is true for localized events, as much as it has proven true nationally, as COVID-19 hotspots shifted across the country, affecting cities, communities, and hospital systems with a moving wave of patients.

In the ranking of hospital beds per capita, a blunt measure of hospital surge capacity, the United States has 2.8 hospital beds per every 1,000 people in the country. This linear measure, while crude since it does not count other key ingredients of world-class healthcare such as trained medical professionals and the availability of necessary medical equipment, offers a good proxy for mass casualty readiness. By contrast, South Korea, which has fared well in the pandemic, has 12 hospital beds per 1,000 people and universal access to healthcare coverage. They deployed a rapid testing and contact tracing regime that served like a dragnet in containing the spread of COVID-19.

Increasing healthcare capacity at the physical and human capital levels is necessary as a post-pandemic area for improvement. While some healthcare systems performed better than others across the country, typically skewing to wealthier communities, the national health emergency scorecard did not get good grades. Indeed, much of the logistics and supply chain support called upon from the Federal Government and agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) required the mobilization of field hospitals and navy hospital ships, United States Naval Ship (USNS) Mercy and USNS Comfort to Los Angeles and New York City respectively—although neither was used to full capacity.

The shortfall in terms of medical surge capacity had less to do with hospital beds (especially as cities converted convention centers into field hospitals) and more to do with staff shortages and key materiel, including and especially PPE, ventilators, and other necessary equipment for the frontlines. Using the word strategic to describe the inventory in the national strategic stockpile of essential medical equipment to respond to a large-scale outbreak misses the mark. Indeed, as states and cities fought over supplies, sparking a bidding war and supply chain nightmare, stockpiles were quickly depleted. How public and private sector supply chains fared in this crisis and how to bring nearer to shore or on shore the industrial capabilities necessary to respond to future emergencies is an area for further review.

In terms of the human toll of the pandemic, at the time of publication more than 6 million confirmed cases were identified in the United States, and more than 180,000 people lost their lives. The real numerator and denominator of affected populations is not really known and likely numbers in the millions if antibody tests offer any guide. The frontline medical force serving as the human wall to contain the pandemic was stretched to the brink and are in every way the heroes of these dark times. In the worst hit hospital systems, such as in Manhattan, medical professionals resorted to creating their own makeshift PPE using garbage bags and other ill-suited materials due to supply shortages.

This was tantamount to sending soldiers to battle without body armor, helmets, or ammunition. Needless to say, medical readiness against future pandemics or other mass casualty events needs to be prioritized, as much as universal access to the healthcare system needs to be made available to citizens irrespective of their insured status ahead of the next public health emergency.

The medical frontlines were also strained by the fact that for 13.8 percent of the working age adults who are uninsured (notwithstanding the fact that relief bills called for the removal of COVID-19 testing costs) faced a double-jeopardy. On the one hand, the costs of treatment would be a burden, as much as not getting treated or screened for the virus would potentially endanger others, contributing to the vicious cycle of cases. Indeed, many countries around the world called up retired medical professionals and accelerated the frontline deployment of medical professionals in training like so many reservists in past wars. A veritable medical draft occurred around the world and in parts of the United States in order to buttress frontline capabilities to deal with patient loads. To them, the almost certain prospect of a second wave in the fall is an ill-portent of the long road ahead to push this latest coronavirus back to the shadows from whence it came.

The economic cost of flattening the curve of cases, which were hampered by the general lack of testing at a national scale, along with a shortage of necessary testing equipment like nasopharyngeal swabs, was an indictment of U.S. industrial capacity. This shortfall caused many to invoke the need for war powers to be exercised to compel the private sector to divert their supply chains and production capacity to manufacture necessary medical equipment. Private industry responded to these calls, some begrudgingly under the threat or limited use of war powers, others on their own volition.

As much as the pandemic is a medical and economic emergency of global proportions, it is also very much a supply chain and industrial production shock not seen since war times. The economic transition over the last 75 years, since the end of World War II, prioritized industrial capacity and supply chain efficiency, creating the tightly woven patchwork of manufacturing and inventory sites, shipping, and air cargo lanes that trace the world’s supply and demand. Many of these supply chains either snapped or proved to have little redundancy as the effects of COVID-19 dragged on.

This supply chain and production tension was evident for critical medical supplies, such as ventilators and PPE needed on the frontlines. Countries turned to war powers to shift local industrial production or seize and divert critical supplies from export for local use, proving the cost of outsourcing, off-shoring, and taking a less than strategic view of critical national stockpiles. Indeed, demand across the entire world for three essential stock keeping units (SKUs) surged at exactly the same time—ventilators, the difference between life and death for the worst-hit COVID-19 patients, N95 masks, and PPE.

In the same way you cannot buy insurance when the house is on fire, you cannot develop a supply chain strategy in the middle of a global emergency. The scarcity of these critical items turned desperation into ingenuity and corporate largess, as firms, such as Facebook, Apple, and SoftBank, among others, donated millions of N95 marks, designed makeshift ventilators, or shifted production of perfume and spirits to make hand sanitizer. The ingenuity and largesse also showed up in the small-footprint manufacturing of critical supplies using decentralized networks of 3D printers and open-source blueprints of key supplies, such as medical face shields, among other items.

Other aspects of the world’s supply chains ground to a halt during the pandemic. Critical supplies, for example, in medicine, which already labor under cost-prohibitive market distortions were and remain strained. This is especially true as the search for medical treatments and cures for COVID-19 flagged other drugs and treatments, such as Remdesivir and the controversial use of Hydroxychloroquine, used to combat dread diseases like Ebola and malaria as potential panaceas. Clinical trials are ongoing with these and others treatments, diverting supplies from their originally intended use, which itself can imperil many lives or distort pricing and availability.

In the crisis, all supply became national, local and hyperlocal as the effect of an ongoing lockdown grinds on. This is perhaps truest with the food supply chain on both the demand and supply sides of the equation. On the demand side, as more than 40 million people filed for unemployment, long lines formed across the country for food kitchens, pantries, and donation sites to help feed the most vulnerable and the newly unemployed. On the supply side, meat production has been particularly hard hit as the close proximity and unhygienic conditions of animal slaughter proved to be a veritable petri dish for the spread of COVID-19. Many meat processing plants across the country that were compelled to remain open as essential services, saw 50 percent or more of their frontline staff affected by the virus, disrupting production and further exacerbating efforts to flatten the curve. This issue will also raise the specter of employee class action lawsuits and worker’s compensation claims, among other challenges.

Here too, any semblance of supply chain normalcy, especially at the retail level, was provided by technology-powered platforms, such as Amazon and a wide range of delivery services that could cater to social distancing requirements. The steadfast U.S. Postal Service could add pandemics to the perils that would not stop postal workers from completing their rounds, along with “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

As worker strikes and walkouts showed, however, even domestic supply chains are not inured to disruptions, particularly in a public health event that shifted so much retail and commercial demand to online platforms. The pandemic exposed already strenuous working conditions and paltry protections of warehouse, inventory, and logistics workers, like long-haul truckers, the other unseen heroes. Firms, such as Amazon, Gojo, Safeway, and Domino’s, promised to ramp up hiring by the thousands to buttress their forces, while others, such as Macy’s, J. Crew, and Modell’s, declared bankruptcy, perhaps marking the end of the local fight for life of physical retail shopping and box stores. An onslaught against national retail chains that began with the ease of online commerce may have been sealed by the global pandemic. Meanwhile, hyperlocal businesses such as restaurants, corner stores, bodegas, and others, proved to be resilient and adaptable—their comparatively light asset base and low overhead became an advantage.

Much of the federal intervention, led by agencies like FEMA, was nothing short of a wartime airlift and supply chain effort. Having a national backstop and strategic readiness capability that can spring to action in tangible (smoking crater disasters, such as floods, fires, windstorms) or intangible disasters (blue sky events, such as cyberattacks, vector-borne or communicable diseases, bio-terrorism) is not optional. It is essential. While much of the national emergency response framework and human capital capacity is geared for traditional natural hazards, such as fires and floods, the response to the pandemic, which triggered disaster declarations in all 50 states and U.S. territories, underscores the need for whole-of-society readiness. How tightly woven, just-in-time supply chains and private sector production performed in this crisis raises important questions about what should be onshore, near-shore, or re-shored—lest we turn to wartime production powers in the next crisis.

If there was any silver lining in terms of systems that were clearly resilient before the pandemic struck, it was the World Wide Web. The internet, that global network of decentralized routers and undersea cables that form the backbone of the modern economy, endured its greatest test yet without breaking.

Almost overnight, the entire planet went to remote work, schooling, and hundreds of millions of video conference calls for events as important as cabinet meetings and as routine as birthday parties. In all, demand surged to peak levels around the world, and technology firms were at once the world’s greatest source of business continuity and the biggest winners from the crisis.

This raises important questions about extending the perimeter of high-speed internet access to include people and communities who are on the margins or who cannot afford the types of modern accoutrements on the hardware side of things to remain current and connected. While the internet itself did not collapse, low-cost, reliable, and high-speed access remains a challenge in the United States and certainly around the world, where 41 percent of the population have no internet access.

Low-income populations, particularly public school children, teachers, and rural communities were hard hit by the lack of reliable connectivity at the network provider, hardware and software levels. It did not help that for many of these communities, particularly in Title 1 schools or for single parent households, remote learning without reliable connectivity, on an empty stomach, and jeopardized sources of household income made much of the school year a write off for many households.

Here too the private sector stepped up support by waiving or lowering internet connection costs or providing wireless hotspots as teachers and communities implored them for support. For so many, technological literacy and living or operating in areas with high-speed connectivity proved to be a major difference maker for all facets of business continuity or normalcy. This raises the question of whether or not the internet and universal access at high-speeds should be viewed as a public good—a core protocol layer for universal information sharing and communication—rather than a source of rent seeking for firms.

Indeed, the domain of population scale, open source technologies is a vital area of ongoing work in both the public and private spheres. Clearly the investments in these technologies need to be recuperated, this is where the so-called “application layer” can exist on top of digital commons. After all, the research and development costs for building the internet was in fact a breakthrough courtesy of the long investment horizon of the public balance sheet. Now, so many tech titans call the internet home, through which they gain market share, access, and competitive advantage through offering differentiated services. Should the same standards not hold true across a range of essential services in the public interest? What balanced model can emerge enabling every U.S. household to have reliable, high-speed internet access and the computational power necessary at the hardware level to enjoy the on-ramps to the twenty-first century?

Indeed, at the peak of the crisis (at least its first wave), universalizing access to technology became a public policy priority, however short lived. First, policymakers called for a digital wallet available as a public good for every American, which would have enabled a digital dollar to speed up direct relief payments to citizens in the $2.2 trillion dollar stimulus bill. While this concept was short lived in the CARES Act, it nevertheless raises important questions about how digital and analog systems can coexist to improve optionality. If, as originally proposed, Americans had broad access to digital wallets, it would merely enhance choice and ensure that if ever one of the many banking or payments options fail, there is redundancy in the financial system. Indeed, this concept would hold true across a range of issues outlined in this report.

If the only classroom that could hold students and amplify their minds was made of cinder blocks and not supportive of distance learning on small screens, we would be worse for wear. If the only way to vote was to wait in a long line and cast a physical ballot rather than a mail-in or digital vote, the lack of optionality would imperil voter participation and enfranchisement—certainly a real risk as the prospect of a second wave coinciding with the general election in November seems likely.

High-trust, high-assurance open source technology is at the heart of addressing these issues and adding more redundancy and ease of use for the provision of a wide range of citizen services. Open source software (OSS) renders the source code underpinning a digital system publicly available for others to use, copy, learn from, and modify for their benefit. In a public sector context, OSS allows governments to build digital systems that can not only meet needs in their communities but also be easily replicated by other jurisdictions anywhere in the world. OSS is particularly powerful in times of global crisis, like the coronavirus pandemic, when governments have urgent needs that demand similar solutions. Using OSS, governments can collaborate and share world-class digital systems to ensure societies and citizens of all capacities have access to digital infrastructure. A number of pioneering governments adopted OSS during the pandemic both within countries and internationally. For example, the state of Alabama is now using a COVID-19 information hub developed by the state of New Jersey, and the city of San Francisco is harnessing data platforms developed by the municipal government of Tokyo.

An example of critical digital tools that could be developed and scaled with open source code are digital contact tracing technologies. To date, only the State of Virginia has released a contact tracing app and has yet to publish its source code. The Virginia app, COVIDWISE, uses a Bluetooth API created by Apple and Google to trace the location of potentially infected carriers. In the meantime, other states are pursuing contact tracing apps through their own procurement processes. If U.S. states had coordinated an effort and pooled resources to build a modular, interoperable, open source solution, each state could have quickly integrated that system at low cost to provide nationwide contact tracing coverage. The contact tracing technology produced by fragmented, duplicative, proprietary development efforts have been slow and inaccessible for most states. While some solutions with a global focus have been developed using open source code, including Singapore’s TraceTogether and PathCheck Foundation’s COVID SafePaths solutions, the U.S. states have not yet become accustomed to relying on open source technology. Adoption of critical public sector technologies like digital contact tracing within the United States will be suboptimal until governments at the local, state, and federal levels can create better governance strategies to coordinate software development and deployment and ensure wide adoption.

The bedrock for these services to emerge is a well-functioning, robust high-speed internet connection, which should be universally available and as cost effective as possible as part of our digital commons. We only know how dependent we are on this connectivity when we no longer have it or household, business, operational, and educational continuity depend upon it. The pandemic should invigorate the drive to improve the speed, coverage, and access to the internet, which proved to be one of the few resilient systems that withstood the onslaught of a global shutdown and an overnight transition to remote work.⁴

Banking and payment systems are vitally important to creating a competitive economy. The freer and the broader the access the better, as basic banking services and the ability to freely spend, send, save, and secure money are in many ways the arterial system of a modern economy.

Indeed, as bipartisan economic stimulus bills and economic recovery efforts to the tune of $5.5 trillion so far have been deployed to counter the deleterious economic effects of the pandemic, the country’s banking and payment networks were the conveyors of this economic relief. And yet, certain challenges have emerged that underscore the fundamental vulnerability of financial systems that do not speak to one another in terms of interoperability and are hard to mobilize quickly when the first come first serve lines of businesses formed to receive payroll protection support.

Much of this funding, particularly the early rounds, went to larger firms with already established banking relationships and credit histories, whereas reaching the more vulnerable intended beneficiaries of this support, namely small- to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) that are in many ways the jobs and economic engines of the U.S. economy employing more than 58.9 million people before the pandemic struck, was more challenging—they were hard to serve in part because they were hard to find. The net result was that over $1 billion of potentially forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans went to publicly traded companies. In some cases, following public and reputational pressure, many large firms who exploited loopholes in these programs ended up returning the money.

The maladministration of economic and direct relief to an entire country, a complicated matter in normal times, for example in processing tax filings and returns, would be all the more complicated by the need for speed and precision to stave off economic crisis. The reality that America’s banking and payment systems do not speak to each other and that the neediest of people and small businesses are hard to find in this system or were either unbanked or underbanked was a precondition before the pandemic that the crisis only made worse.

In order to effectively target stimulus to prop up the faltering economy as the effect of the lockdown functionally paralyzed most commerce, policymakers resorted to “blunt force” and analog methods. This included mailing $1,200 stimulus checks to 130 million Americans, a process that could take as long as 5 months from initial pledges to actual physical checks arriving. Others received comparatively faster direct deposits as the principal methods of reaching individual households. If you were not in the financial system before the pandemic, neither of these methods of direct relief supported you very well.⁵

In all, 24 million American households were considered unbanked or underbanked before the crisis. Even in “normal” times, these people must often turn to usurious and predatory solutions for alternative banking options. These include payday loans to bridge the check-to-check float that is a confounding reality for far too many U.S. households barely able to get by before the crisis and now pushed over the edge.

From payday lending to tax refund loans, to the over-reliance on credit with disproportionately high interest rates, often pushing 400 percent APR or higher on average, low-income families and those on the margin of the formal economy, including small businesses, were the hardest to reach and the hardest hit. This much is true for the more than 44 million people who make up America’s diaspora population coming from all over the world to power various aspects of the U.S. economy. For many of these people, as with the more than 272 million economic migrants around the world who send remittances to their loved ones in their home countries, the lack of low-cost, non-physical payment options is a clear vulnerability.

Indeed, one of the challenges amplifying financial marginalization is that we now have to factor digital and technological inequality into assessing economic marginalization. This is true as physical cash, already on the decline around the world and certainly in the United States with the rise of cashless alternatives from retail payment endpoints to phone-based nearfield computing options. The spread of COVID-19 literally gave new meaning to money laundering, as countries resorted to physically washing their national currencies or advising against their use as a potential conveyor of the disease. The net result is an increasingly louder call for digitization of payments and currencies, including a growing wave of central banks exploring ways of adding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to their national money in circulation.

Digital numismatists have been advocating for the role cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology can play not only in democratizing access to the financial system, but in creating a multidirectional, user-controlled payment landscape. Indeed, the struggles and the amount of time needed to execute direct relief, let alone being able to target it to those in greatest need, certainly speaks to the limitations of having a one-sided economic relationship between the state and the citizen, rather than a bidirectional one. Adding greater optionality, lowering holding, transfer, and switching costs, while enhancing the openness of payment networks can ensure faster, more targeted relief in the next crisis, while addressing stubborn problems for economically marginalized people who pay the most for even basic financial services.

Resilience, unlike risk, benefits from compound effects. Simply put, investments in resilience, household savings and closing what insurers refer to as the protection gap, accrue. There are some fundamental challenges, however, to improving economic resilience across the United States. Many of these have as much to do with market structure as they do with systemic levels of income inequality, as well as with the relatively low dispersion across the country in terms of economic productivity.

In disaggregating the proportion of economic value and activity carried out in the United States, one-third of GDP is derived from 31 (.01 percent) U.S. counties. Therefore, as much as U.S. citizens may have won the global birthright game, inside the United States there is also a ZIP code lottery that will say a lot about your long-term prospects and the public resources (in the form of taxes and other government or community funds) that will be available to you and can be mobilized in a crisis. Some wealthy communities, such as Bolinas, California, were the first in the country to test all of their residents for COVID-19, for example, pushing the risk and spread of the virus downmarket as it were.

If long term investments in resilience compound, for example raising levees by three feet provides three additional feet of flood resilience, what is the formula to improve economic resilience in a country with 20 percent of the population relying on credit to make ends meet before the pandemic? In addition to more protections afforded through employment-related programs, facilitating access to emergency funds through home equity, unemployment insurance and credit markets can serve as important first lines of household defense, rather than relying on government largesse or public support programs singularly.

Unemployment insurance programs are fraught with political emotion in the United States, with some arguing that they discourage work, while others arguing that they are a necessary part of social safety nets. The fact remains, the broad preexistence of unemployment insurance programs can be a net benefit and a faster way of distributing direct economic relief, while accruing paid-in capital to these programs. If fears remain about how rich the benefits of these programs should be, managing claim triggers on a stepladder basis—depending on market conditions or whether a disaster is declared or not—can contribute to balancing incentives versus economic resilience. Either way, with such a disproportionately large share of the economic costs of risk being shouldered by taxpayers, creating, pre-funding, and maintaining actuarially sound financial shields can make a difference.

In a force majeure case such as the pandemic, there is often little else to turn to but these types of insurance-like programs. Therefore, we would stand to gain as a country by broadening their availability and strategically prefunding these coffers for future events, whether for rainy days or blue sky disasters. Crucially, like all well-funded insurance programs, unemployment or hardship funding can leverage the law of large numbers and produce actuarially sound prefunding for future generations of disaster survivors, saving households as much as the economy from the deleterious effects of low economic resilience and mass layoffs.

Another area of opportunity to enhance economic resilience is to look at broader standardization on moratoria for credit and debt instruments, such as mortgage and rental agreements. As is often the case in disasters, the specter of high default rates on consumer credit, loans, and other financed debt obligations shows how quickly a crisis can spill over into other areas of the economy. Yet access to credit even in normal times is often a lifeline for millions of Americans. In a disaster, credit is a major difference-maker in shoring up economic resilience, but great care must be taken to ensure a temporary credit bridge does not bleed into a debt bubble, bankruptcies, and a tidal wave of defaults, which appears to be looming over the U.S. economy.

Even before the pandemic struck, the United States was laboring under a perilously heavy debt burden, with credit cards fueling $930 billion in debt, while student loans and other forms of personally guaranteed credit spiraled to $1.5 trillion in total. Clearly, post-pandemic debt forgiveness and resetting credit records at population scale may very well be an important tradeoff in restoring consumer confidence and lifting the penalty of poverty that has barred the gates of opportunity for millions of people. Indeed, with over 25 percent of the workforce now dependent on government unemployment backstops, whether through unemployment insurance programs or payroll-focused bridge loans such as PPP, the public interest on livable wages, bridging the gender pay gap, as well as shoring up economic benefits in a harmonized manner should be prioritized.

Finally, with so many of the economic consequences of risks skipping the private sector balance sheet of insurers and risk-sharing funds only to land on the shoulders of taxpayers, more has to be done to crowd-in risk-sharing capital. Indeed, it can be seen as a market failure despite all the ingenuity and financial engineering available to shore up complex risks, from uncorrelated catastrophe bonds—which remain pitiably shallow at $10.3 billion in total—to the lack of uptake of flood, earthquake, and other insurance programs. The pandemic underscores the need for broadening the base of insurance: For each 1 percent increase in private sector risk sharing, there is a 22 percent decrease in the taxpayer burden of economic losses. It is foolish to head into a new decade so woefully underinsured against the specter of large, complex risks so certain.

The term future of work is a euphemism for the pending wave of disruption to job markets courtesy of a range of complex forces. Technology, the advent of industrial automation, and varying degrees of workforce readiness for the so-called jobs of the future came at us fast during the pandemic. Add in the long standing tension between traditionalists for whom productivity must be seen requiring a physical presence at an office or work location, and the modernists who have been clamoring for wider acceptance of remote work and workplace flexibility, and the future of work is a complex domain indeed. All of this complexity and the far off horizon issue many employers and employees thought they could forestall has been fast forwarded to today.

Indeed, in a matter of months, for those so fortunate to have kept their employment amid depression-level joblessness, the future of work came fast. Glitzy city center offices were quickly vacated as social distancing norms took hold. Video conferencing services such as the eight-year-old upstart, Zoom, succeeded in doing in months what other platforms have taken decades to achieve—gain ubiquity as a utility for remote workers, learners, and many others who turned to these services for a semblance of normalcy. Indeed, the onset of the future of work was so rapid that habitually itinerant business travelers turned to Zoom, making the platform more valuable than all U.S. airlines combined.

While no small screen is a long-term substitute for a person-to-person connection, in an age beset by climate change and travel fatigue, the proof that we can in fact carry on the vast majority of business remotely may be hard to reverse. Some companies, especially those that already offered flexible work options, including being supportive of bring your own device (BYOD) policies, work from home options, among others, were among the most resilient in the crisis. While not all employers will be able to provide this flexibility, nor will many want to as the toll of cabin fever and lost team camaraderie sets in, the fact that so much work can continue at a distance is an opportunity not a threat. The fact that only 7 percent of the U.S. labor force enjoyed these benefits pre-pandemic is a point of vulnerability.

Despite lockdown conditions changing throughout the country, many employers have already made the call for the full year, with large technology firms being among the first to tell their workforce they should remain at home through the balance of 2020. Here too, as in other areas in this report, optionality is the key, especially as remote work will likely become a permanent condition for millions of employees. For employers that clung to a productivity model where hours labored in a physical location are a proxy for productivity, notwithstanding the productivity, morale, and cost drains of slow commutes, the pandemic was hard to adapt to. The post-pandemic reality may be harder still, as it is likely flexible working options and permanent work from home or remote work opportunities may remain de rigueur, particularly for service and knowledge workers.

This reality will add further downward pressure on real estate markets, particularly in the commercial segment as tenants weigh the costs and benefits of billions spent on owning or renting high-end real estate that was functionally a vacant or stranded asset for an entire year. How market demand and the physical return to work recovers later in 2020 will very much depend on the severity and likelihood of a second COVID-19 wave hitting the United States in the fall, as well as the prospects of a vaccine, better contact tracing, and workplace and commuter hygiene standards.

Just as a cottage industry has emerged around cyber risk management and health, safety and environmental issues (HSE), apprehensions about the return to work and a new (unsettling) normal, will require the emergence of high-assurance services about office cleanliness, social distancing facilities, and the potential of a staggered work and school week. One of the bigger challenges to overcome are the already overcrowded mass transit systems across the United States, which could be a veritable petri dish if the incidence of community spread of COVID-19 is not entirely abated. Given the choice and the unfortunate prospect of class action lawsuits over employee safety standards, business, political, and community leaders will be cautious to make the call that all is in fact clear. When they do, the lingering effects of the world’s largest work from home experiment, along with the deleterious toll on confidence to work in the traditional form (long crowded commutes and all) may be hard to overcome.

If nurses and doctors were on the frontlines of fighting the pandemic, epidemiologists and scientists donning lab coats were in the war room bringing the fight to the virus at a microscopic level. Like all great crises, prevention is better than cure and while U.S. public health officials and politicians missed many clear signals that a global pandemic was imminent, we can certainly use the after-action of this dreadful event to reinforce our national and global readiness for the next one.

Zoonotic diseases that leap from the animal kingdom to plague humanity are an all-too-frequent reality. Born in part by our inability as a species to respect nature’s boundaries and born in part by poverty, and dietary and animal-harvest traditions (from which industrial scale meat production is not sufficiently protected), zoonotic diseases have an easy first jump to infect our species. The second quantum leap, as was the case with the global spread of COVID-19, is fueled by globalization and the porous containment and contact tracing net around the world.

COVID-19 is not only the first zoonotic disease let alone coronavirus (so named for the appearance of crown-like spikes), to threaten our way of life. While it is the first major pandemic to halt the global economy in over 100 years, since the Spanish flu (itself a zoonotic disease stemming from birds and the crowded post-World War I camps) claimed more than 50 million lives. Other epidemics have emerged over the last century—virtually all of them had their origins and nexus in humanity’s proximity with nature. From the SARS outbreak in Guangdong Province, to MERS (both coronaviruses), to the spread of swine flu, H5N1, and the dreadful Ebola outbreak in Guinea, our ability to deter, detect, and respond effectively to infectious diseases is not merely a national security priority but a global one. The same priority holds true for vector-borne diseases, such as Zika among many others, that break the sub-tropical barrier continuing their inexorable march north buoyed by climate change.

Against this scorecard, few countries in the world fared well. Those at the top of the league tables—the best of the worst alternatives—had prior experience in combating upper respiratory diseases, tight nets around airports and ports of entry, and comparatively small, closed countries with trusted, technology-forward institutions. Many other countries, including the United States, resorted to the same pandemic response playbook that might have been used against the Spanish flu 100 years ago. Imposing quarantines, derived from the Italian word for 40 signifying 40 days of social distancing and isolation of sick people, wearing masks, and hoping for a scientific breakthrough of a vaccine or losing the war of attrition through gradual herd immunity.

What is clear is that, as dreadful as COVID-19 is, the onset of these types of global outbreaks may no longer be a 1-in-100 year event but rather a more frequent occurrence. Against the choice of “stop everything” economic and social paralysis, which itself has massively harmful effects on lives, livelihood, and public health, better pandemic preparedness, global collaboration, and a trusted early alert system are needed to catch, contain, and mitigate the spread of novel communicable diseases. As the vast amount of money spent in both public and private labs in the search for a vaccine and other treatments for COVID-19 highlight, responding to public health crises of this scale is clearly a shared priority. Our collective national and international scientific, vaccinology, and epidemiological capacity must be arrayed in kind as a global shared service.

The U.S. medical system, like many other countries, labored under the strain of lack of reliable and scalable testing capacity, which itself meant the numerator and denominator of the spread of COVID-19 were and remain largely unknown. This was true until the most severe cases presented themselves in overwhelmed hospital systems only to find the treatment options wanting and the ventilators and other necessary medical equipment in scarce supply. This testing bottleneck means that the indicators public health officials are relying on to convey containment of the outbreak—the national thrust to flatten the curve—are largely lagging figures.

While some breakthroughs in vaccinology are underway courtesy of Operation Warp Speed, ostensibly the world’s fastest run of clinical trials for a vaccine—a veritable space race to find a cure for COVID-19—the likely outcome is that it may still take 12 to 18 months to find a cure, if one is found at all. The other challenge will be to ensure that the on-shore and nearshore pharmaceutical production capacity is on hand to ramp up vaccine production to population scale and to eventually ensure global supplies are available, lest seasonal reappearance becomes a threat.

Insidiously, as scientists toil to find a cure, many labs and the computing capacity arrayed against COVID-19 have fallen prey to cyberattacks presumably to obtain valuable vaccine and treatment intellectual property or to disrupt advances. This may be a perverse example of humanity’s zero-sum nature: Even in the face of a collective global threat with a common enemy, people will still not set aside their distrust nor race for political and economic gain.

As the world slowly gains the upper hand in the fight against COVID-19, science and sound public health should have the loudest seat at the war room table. Much work will be needed in restoring public trust in global health institutions that either faltered in the face of this fast-evolving pandemic or were swayed by political and economic pressures to not sound the alarm louder and earlier that the emergence of COVID-19 was not a drill.

As is often the case, in the face of great threats with high operational complexity, the United States must turn to its last lines of defense first with greater frequency. This was true in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, in what was a predictable disaster, as the city’s system of levees could not cope with a major hurricane. The post-Katrina era has seen either the federalization or militarization of disaster response become all the more frequent.

This pattern follows the run up of mega disasters affecting the country that quickly overwhelm local emergency response resources and capacity. From record-breaking hurricanes, such as Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Superstorm Sandy, to name a few, to record-setting flooding and wildfires, national disaster-readiness capabilities must be shored up. What the pandemic has shown us is that these capabilities must be broadened to respond to a vastly interconnected and rapidly evolving risk landscape that can lay havoc on communities and the economy whether we face a smoking crater or blue sky disaster.

The scale, impact, and likelihood of disasters is proving that the model of building fortress nations is very difficult. This highlights the fact that people are the first link in the chain of national resilience. It should be troubling from a public policy and safety point of view that such a large percentage of the population falls through porous safety nets at the local, state, tribal, and territorial levels, eventually falling in the hands of strained federal programs. Whether in the form of direct relief, post-disaster support or otherwise, the pyramid should be inverted—for a federal or military intervention is often the costliest kind and can engrain moral hazards in how community risk sharing is perpetuated.⁶

This is not to suggest that federal disaster response programs are not important. Rather, the observation is that the risk landscape and the clustering of mega disasters, for which the COVID-19 pandemic is the most acute event in the crescendo of complex risks affecting the country over the last 50 years, are calling up last line assets first. Even then, the long range impact of these events is still overwhelming. For example, post-Katrina New Orleans has never fully recovered its pre-disaster population. A similar out migration from Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria saw more than 120,000 people leave the island, in a veritable climate change mass exodus. In this environment, the tax base, population, and workforce of a community deflate at the same time, making post-disaster economic recovery all the more complex.

As in Hurricane Maria, the deployment of military assets, including the hospital ship USNS Comfort, to buttress local response capabilities is an important part of the response and recovery effort. Indeed, much of FEMA’s work during the crisis has been to serve as a supply chain management and logistics agency to coordinate the national response to the pandemic. Military-style airlifts of vital supply for frontline healthcare workers, such as PPE, ventilators, and the N95 masks, were the type of materiel FEMA’s supply chain was mobilized to support—a demand curve covering virtually the entire country, and world, seeking the same supplies at precisely the same time.

The lack of prefunded strategic capabilities, stockpiles, and in particular financial resources that can be mobilized nationally on an all-hazards basis is clearly a vulnerability. Since the taxpayer is increasingly first in line to absorb the long term costs of large-scale complex events, whether they are caused by man-made, natural, or emerging threats, then it would stand to reason that better stewardship of these resources can be handled through pooling economic resources against future threats. These funds should be entirely segregated, evergreen, and held as a risk-agnostic instrument that can accrue over time and used to shield the very taxpayers and citizens who are already first in line to bear the brunt of economic losses.

A national chief risk officer should have overall accountability for shoring up financial resilience on an all-hazards basis and to report on meaningful ways of bridging known protection gaps that expose citizens and communities to increasingly predictable and deleterious losses.

The pandemic, more so than any other event since World War II, has illuminated the disequilibrium of addressing twenty-first century challenges with twentieth century technologies and nineteenth century institutions. Indeed, while the ranking of how countries, governments, and different institutions fared is still being formed, what is clear in looking at the most successful cases of flattening the COVID-19 curve, limiting the loss of life and broad observance of social distancing calls, is that trusted, technology-forward institutions—and consequently those countries they call home—fared better than others.

The pre-pandemic trend line on institutional trust has been on a 30-year decline—born in part from growing public disaffection and fueled in part by hyper-partisan political and economic trends. The pandemic has underscored precisely how divided and unequal the United States has become. The most powerful emblem of this discord, polarization, and anger is the confluence of record numbers of activities and mass protests signaling that Black lives matter in contravention with social distancing directives. At the same time, the crisis has also revealed the importance of public institutions and the vital role they carry in keeping our society moving forward: from public educators, who had to master distance learning overnight, often managing students ill-equipped with technology and insufficiently reliable internet connectivity, to the many essential workers who keep cities, states and governments running, often at their own peril.

Perhaps the biggest fight at the institutional level as the crisis unfolded has been between public health authorities and economic and political interests. Even the WHO has been mired by these challenges, as calls for an inquiry into its initial COVID-19 response and slow pace of labelling the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) and then later a pandemic, grow louder. At issue is the lingering question of whether the WHO conspired with China on covering up the initial scope and severity of the outbreak greatly hindering international collaboration, particularly between the United States and the international health body. At its nadir, the United States withheld funds and withdrew from the WHO adding to the specter that efforts to combat future international health emergencies, let alone the present one, would remain a go-it-alone affair.

This should be greatly troubling, because if anything a global pandemic that affects people indiscriminately and has no respect for international, let alone national borders, is a reminder that in the face of global threats, all of humanity is in this together.

Restoring the wellspring of trust in institutions, especially those that easily buckled under the strain of COVID-19, will take concerted effort as governments brace under the fiscal strain of the crisis. U.S. states alone face $650 billion in revenue shortfalls as economies struggle to recover and policymakers operationalize costly countercyclical payments and benefits programs to help their citizens weather the crisis. In this turbulent fiscal environment, the public sector will need to operate with unprecedented efficiency and austerity. Historically, governments worldwide lose trillions of dollars each year to corruption and tax evasion. In principle, restoring these losses would be enough to fund all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Public finance systems in many countries around the world are long overdue for an upgrade.

There are a number of compelling technology use cases that can make critical improvements to government systems that deliver public services and form the bedrock of social wellbeing. Organizations like the Prosperity Collaborative, a coalition of the World Bank, EY, MIT, New America, and the Michael Dukakis Institute are exploring new ways to help governments solve urgent public finance challenges. The Collaborative is building a movement to leverage open source digital technologies to hardwire accountability, efficiency and transparency into public sector revenue collection, management and distribution. These solutions could not only help restore funding to an embattled public sector but also create fairer systems that restore public trust in institutions.

Structural changes to public finance institutions and others, such as the ability to support national-level remote voting, access to universal paid medical leave, and leveraging open systems to expand digital commons and access to technology, should not be one-off crisis responses but rather become a part of our institutional norms.

The same holds true for institutional readiness when it comes to technology enablement, public trust, and accountability. Examples of distorting or manipulating reported COVID-19 cases, as the tradeoff between flattening the curve and grinding economic losses put pressure on the truth—however, limited accurate figures have been available due to testing efficacy and shortages. Say nothing of the challenge and the fundamental tension between healthcare information privacy and the inability to scale contact tracing or technology-based solutions that could show the effects of community spread in real time and enable people to more accurately navigate a new normal with exposure information in the palm of their hands rather than entire communities and countries flying blindly.

Undoubtedly, authoritarian countries, especially those that can easily shun the human right to privacy, will solidify their power in this crisis as new technologies and contact tracing approaches reached scale. In other cases, the ineffective public response, along with the hard-to-hide truth of the pandemic’s grim toll on communities may drive change and demands for greater accountability. As with all things, there is a constant need for equilibrium when balancing public interest, privacy, security, and accountability. Institutions around the world must build safeguards and proceed cautiously as they navigate widespread deployment of technology, blurred lines between public and private information and the potential risk of data misuse and abuse.

As in great crises in the past such as the rise of global institutions in the aftermath of World War II, which gave rise to the current political and economic system, this crisis will undoubtedly shape new institutions while triggering calls for the transformation of existing ones. How this call to action is heeded, along with the need for careful balance on governance, accountability, and the deployment of technology, will help create a path for greater resilience and shared prosperity in the post-pandemic era. There will be new emerging threats to our way of life and the opportunity to create and maintain a competitive yet equitable economy. How we rise to this occasion will be the defining moment of this generation.

Against the complex and interconnected set of issues outlined in this report, key policy considerations must weigh institutional transformation, as much as they weigh civic engagement and whole-of-society mobilization, to speed up post-pandemic recovery. Recovery alone, however, would miss the broader opportunity to mend the many areas of our economy and system that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed to be either frail or broken before this crisis struck.

Against this backdrop, policymakers must weigh the twin obligations of enhancing post-pandemic resilience, while improving the preconditions in the United States for shared prosperity and social equity. Following the largest non-war loss of lives since the Korean War and Depression-era economic intervention, this generation of public and private sector leaders have a unique obligation and opportunity to recast a more hopeful, secure, participatory, and competitive vision of the future.

• Citizen data wallets: National, verifiable, and authenticated wallets for the provision of government and interstitial services, as well as the facilitation of citizen engagement.
• Universal internet access: High-speed, low-cost internet connectivity, not singularly through risk-prone physical infrastructure but via current generation mobile broadband connectivity. The provision of coverage on a national scale, including patching low-connectivity areas, rural communities, among others.
• Low-cost or free hardware access: The provision of essential hardware such as computers and tablets, particularly for vulnerable communities and students in Title 1 schools.
• Omnichannel voting: Universal, omnichannel voting options on a national scale.
• Resilience corps: The amplification of a civilian resilience corps, such as FEMA Corps and AmeriCorps NCCC, to prepare communities to respond to disasters on an all-hazards basis, while enhancing disaster readiness capacity.
• Gap analysis: Reviewing community-level risk, readiness, and resilience gaps in terms of response capacity on an all-hazards basis, including potential economic value at risk and funding gaps in public and private resources.
• National chief risk officer: The establishment of a cabinet-level Chief Risk Officer to set a national strategy for pre-funding a national risk-sharing pool on a risk-weighted basis to shield the public balance sheet from increasingly predictable and devastating losses.
• Economic risk-sharing: The establishment of a strategic risk-sharing fund, aggregating existing national risk-sharing programs, and funding them over the long term via public and private sector measures (e.g. all-hazard catastrophe bonds, insurance, reinsurance, and publicly-funded paid-in capital).
• Healthcare surge capacity: Expansion of healthcare surge capacity, the availability of hospital beds per capita, as well as a national reserve corps of trained medical professionals capable of responding to mass casualty events irrespective of the cause.
• Pandemic preparedness accelerator: The establishment of a DARPA-style project to spur long range preparedness for communicable diseases, biodefense, and rapid development and approvals in vaccinology, mitigation, and treatments.
• Early alert system: Development and deployment of a trusted national and global early alert network for future outbreaks with real-time threat reporting and response capabilities.
• Contact and exposure tracing: Development and deployment of national citizen-level contact tracing and privacy-preserving threat reporting capabilities and early alert frameworks for all-hazard public safety exposures.
• Emerging technologies: Development and deployment of national blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based land registries supporting disaster proofing and rapid response, for example via geo-referenced disaster declarations.
• Parametric claim triggers: Enablement of national real-time disaster relief capabilities and low-cost parametric insurance capabilities.
• Healthcare cost waivers: Medical insurance and healthcare cost waivers for testing, treatment, and public health compliance.
• Telehealth expansion: Expansion of national, at-home telemedicine, low-cost medical treatment, and pharmaceutical networks.
• Universal healthcare: Expansion of universally available, personally-portable low-cost health care options.
• Debt forgiveness: Establishment of a student loan credit bridge and forgiveness program.
• Credit scoring reset: Resetting credit scores and minimum payment, forgiveness and interest rate structures to restore consumer confidence and not penalize borrowers for defaults with an implied public backstop.
• Free basic banking: Universal free basic banking, with no minimum balance provisions.