One of the lessons experts learned from the 1918 flu pandemic is how quickly the pandemic was forgotten and how fast it disappeared from the political discourse.
The one lesson learned from a pandemic should be to never forget because forgetting doesn’t lead to positive public health outcomes.
There has been several global public health emergencies since 1918 such as SARS in 2003 and the 2009 H1N1pandemic influenza. Yet, these events have caught authorities and the general public by surprise, but not the epidemiologist who have been studying pandemics were not surprised.
Another lesson to remember is that governments have the responsibility to prepare for a pandemic; they have the obligation to invest in public-health systems to protect their citizens from both the threat and the reality of the next pandemic.
References: