During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world faced an unprecedented level of challenge in attempting to stop the spread of the disease. Now, as progress is continuously made, this current time offers an opportunity to reflect on our management of this pandemic and consider lessons learned for future implications.  To investigate which measures were the most effective, I reviewed public health policies, guidance, and their effect on reducing the spread and severity of COVID-19. From this research, I found that the most effective public health measures in curbing widespread transmissions include masking, social distancing, testing, contact tracing, and vaccination. My work proposed specific ways of implementing these existing strategies to improve the management of future pandemic-level disease outbreaks.

When citizens of Wuhan, China starting contracting Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), it was inevitable that the diease was going to spread to the rest of the world, therefore resulting in a pandemic. This disease is caused by SARS-CoV-2 and was discovered for the first time in December of 2019. COVID-19 affects the lungs and has symptoms that are similar to the common cold, pneumonia, or the flu. Over 6 million people have died from COVID-19 and number continue to rise. When there was first talk of the pandemic in the United States, it was said that the United States of America was the most prepared country in the world to tackle a pandemic. The United States ended up having one of the worst outcomes when COVID-19 struck and this was because of faulty planning. It is crucial to know information about COVID-19 before looking into what the United States did wrong. The research provided in the following study shows the lack of testing, bad mask mandates, poor public health funding, etc. Along with this, a plan is created on what to do if a pandemic were to hit the United States once again in the future and how to stop it before it wrecks havoc on the nation.

The US response to the COVID-19 pandemic was disastrous although parts of it were beneficial. Tons of misinformation, a weak central government, a lack of public support, and inaccurate testing contributed to this disastrous response. For the next COVID pandemic, mistakes cannot happen again as it has killed millions of people and has been almost 2 years since the start of its discovery. Many lives could have been saved if the US had a better response to the pandemic. The US should take into consideration of other countries’ actions against the pandemic to better decide its next response. For example, the US should imitate South Korea’s robust testing efforts and enforcement of quarantining guidelines, Africa’s community health systems, and American Samoa’s travel ban. Most importantly, the US needs to learn from its past mistakes. The actions of the next COVID pandemic the US should implement are making sure that the government shouldn’t downplay COVID’s seriousness, clear effective messaging, better COVID testing, more PPE, travel bans, and stronger enforcement of quarantining guidelines. To ensure that the US has a better response to the next COVID pandemic, these recommendations should be followed and enforced.

The purpose of this project is to evaluate the course of COVID-19 with hindsight and use collected data and original research published regarding the pandemic to devise a strategy that would better mitigate the next Coronavirus pandemic. This project targets these specific areas of the mitigation response to COVID-19: Mask Wearing, Social Distancing and Travel Restrictions, Lockdowns and School Shutdowns/Remote learning, Testing/Contact Tracing, and Vaccination Rollout. The analysis of the collected research and data leads to the conclusion that increased mask wearing (along with combatting masking misinformation), increased strictness of social distancing and travel, improvements in testing infrastructure and rollout, reconsideration of school closures, and increased global access to vaccination are among the many ways to better the response to a Coronavirus pandemic in order to reduce the associated social and economic impacts.

For the last nearly two years, the world and its peoples have been on edge, dealing with a pandemic that killed millions of people and altered forever the lives of many others. The COVID-19 pandemic is a once in a generation event that provides an opportunity, despite its horrible impact, for us to be better prepared for future pandemics. This aim of this work is to investigate strategies that were used to combat COVID-19 and develop improved ones that will mitigate both the spread and mortality of similar episodes for the next generation. A review of public health guidance and primary literature suggests many currently used strategies were effective, but additional strategies and guidance are proposed here. These proposed strategies will improve not only preparedness, but also the responses used to tackle and defeat the next COVID pandemic.