Drawing from one of Albert Camus’s seminal works, The Plague, and from America’s response to the influenza pandemic of 1918, medical historian Howard Markel wrote in 1996 for the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) that the most vexing phase of an epidemic is the final act: the act of “subsidence and retrospection.” After the revelation that an outbreak is occurring, after the mitigation tactics and the negotiations of those tactics have come and gone, “Epidemics often end as ambiguously as they appear…once an epidemic peters out and susceptible individuals die, recuperate, or escape, life begins to return to its normal patterns, and healthy people begin to place the epidemic in the past.” Today, it is both difficult and valuable to begin to envision and work toward a post-pandemic normal—one in which we retain some positive changes in the U.S. health and public health system forced by the pandemic.

Read the full commentary from The Rand Blog