November

This week, we ask the question: What comes next for America and Covid-19? Regardless of who is elected in November, we will still be in the midst of a pandemic and facing multiple challenges in addressing it. Culture clashes over mask-wearing, social distancing and vaccines are just a few. We’ll tackle those in our CNN Digital video discussion, but first we start with public policy. Here, two former public officials — Sylvia Mathews Burwell and Frances Fragos Townsend — come together to tell us what should come next.

© Provided by CNN

Despite the deep divisions ravaging our country ahead of the presidential elections, many Americans are looking for answers to a common threat — the coronavirus. As the daily number of cases and deaths have risen, we remain in the throes of a pandemic that has killed more than 225,000 of our fellow citizens and torpedoed our economy. Indeed, the US is averaging more than 68,000 new cases a day.

Regardless of whether Trump or Joe Biden wins the election, though, the next president will confront a dual challenge: managing the current pandemic and ensuring that the country and the world are better prepared when the next plague strikes — as it inevitably will.

It is past time for the nation to make the investments we need to prevent, detect and respond quickly to emerging infectious diseases, like the coronavirus, before they sicken Americans and force catastrophic economic shutdowns. That is the main finding of a bipartisan task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which we were honored to chair.

Here at home, three of the most glaring failures relate to testing, science-based communication and the protection of vulnerable populations.

Nothing has undercut the US response to Covid-19 more than the failure to develop — to this day — a comprehensive nationwide system of testing and tracing that allows public health authorities to rapidly identify infected individuals and their contacts in order to isolate the sick from healthy populations. Without this timely information, authorities are too often flying blind, uncertain of the trajectory of the disease, slow to identify hot spots and unable to stop the spread of the virus through targeted measures that do not require shutting down entire communities and economies.

© Jeff Watts/American University
Sylvia Mathews Burwell

The US experience on testing and contact tracing stands in contrast to nations like South Korea, which rapidly ramped up nationwide testing and successfully mobilized an army of contact tracers. The US cannot put itself in this position again.

The success of public health measures like contact tracing, mask-wearing, and social distancing depends on individuals and communities trusting and adhering to advice from medical professionals and scientists, sometimes delivered by elected and other officials. That public trust must be earned and sustained.

Elected US officials, including the President, often have fallen short as communicators in this pandemic. To prevent future pandemics from becoming a political football, public officials at all levels, from the White