There is an ancient Sanskrit proverb that translates roughly as this: “The banyan does not grow tall by ignoring the storms that bent it.”
Six years after the first winter when the word “coronavirus” passed from the scientific vocabulary into every kitchen table, America has a lot to learn from the banyan tree. We have yet to examine honestly what the Covid storm revealed about our roots, and that is a reckoning we owe not only to those who died, but to those who will.
What happened?
Before we can discuss what must change, we must reckon with what occurred. COVID-19 was a historic public health emergency, a civilizational stress test, and the test results were, by any objective measure, catastrophic for the world’s wealthiest and, on paper, best-prepared nation.
Between 2020 and 2021, the United States recorded more than 1.2 million confirmed COVID-19 deaths across the full span of the pandemic, the highest total of any nation on earth, and among the highest per capita globally. But the formal death count is only the beginning of the accounting.
American life expectancy, that single, honest number that summarizes the state of a civilization’s care for its people, fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.0 years in 2020, a collapse of 1.8 years in a single calendar cycle. That was the largest one-year decline in American life expectancy since World War II. In 2021, with vaccines in hand and hard-won knowledge on the table, life expectancy fell again, another 0.9 years, to 76.1, the lowest level recorded since 1996. Together, the two-year decline of 2.7 years was the steepest consecutive drop since the period of 1921 to 1923, when influenza, poverty, and a nation still unsteady from the Great War conspired against longevity.
The racial topography of this catastrophe demands moral scrutiny as well. From 2019 to 2020, life expectancy for Hispanic and Latino Americans plummeted approximately 3.9 years; for Black Americans, it fell approximately 3.2 years; for White Americans, 1.4 years. COVID-19 was responsible for the majority of the life expectancy decline among Hispanic Americans. American Indian and Alaska Native communities suffered the most severe cumulative losses, a staggering reduction of approximately 6.6 years in life expectancy between 2019 and 2021, leaving AIAN life expectancy at 65.2 years in 2021, a figure that matched the life expectancy of the total U.S. population in the early 1940s.
These statistics are a silhouette of the country that allowed this to happen.
Why did we fail?
How did a nation that has long led the world in biomedical research, pharmaceutical development, and hospital technology perform so badly against a virus? The Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, in its landmark assessment “Improving Pandemic Preparedness: Lessons From COVID-19,” identified the paradox: America’s preparations provided “the illusion, but not the reality, of preparedness.” The pandemic did not expose an absence of systems; it exposed the profound gap between having systems and being able to use them under pressure.
Our health system had structural vulnerabilities. As of the pandemic’s arrival, the United States ranked near the bottom among comparable high-income countries in number of physicians per capita, with just 2.6 practicing physicians per 1,000 people, surpassing only Japan among similar wealthy nations, and had among the lowest hospital bed ratios, at 2.8 beds per 1,000 people, below the OECD average. It ranked poorly in access to health care, owing to the absence of universal coverage and the highest out-of-pocket health care costs among peer nations.
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A healthcare infrastructure that is inaccessible to large segments of the population is not a system prepared to manage a mass emergency. It is a system that will, predictably, fail the people it cannot routinely reach. When millions of Americans delay care for financial reasons in ordinary times, those same millions will be disproportionately sick and vulnerable when extraordinary times arrive.
State-level public health spending had already been eroding before the pandemic. Chronic underfunding had translated into the elimination of more than 40,000 jobs in local health departments in the years leading up to 2020. The pandemic arrived to find public health departments across the country understaffed, underfunded, and structurally unable to absorb the sudden demands of a mass mobilization.
The United States also has an unusually high proportion of its population living in congregate settings, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, correctional institutions, and group care environments, relative to comparable countries. The consequences were swift and terrible. By spring 2020, nursing home and long-term care facility deaths were accounting for roughly 30 to 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths nationally, a proportion that fluctuated throughout the year. These settings, concentrated and difficult to protect, became among the first and most lethal vectors of the virus’s spread.
Then there was the testing catastrophe. A pandemic’s first and most critical requirement is knowledge, specifically, the rapid knowledge of where the virus is and how it moves. America’s failure here was both early and consequential. Despite possessing a vast, high-quality laboratory network, the United States was catastrophically slow to deploy testing in the critical early weeks of 2020. South Korea, which confirmed its first COVID-19 case within days of the United States, scaled up testing rapidly and aggressively in late January 2020, weeks before the United States began widespread testing in March, achieving far lower mortality rates in the early months of the outbreak. The lesson of South Korea was not secret. It was published, discussed, and admired. And still America failed to replicate it.
Testing delays persisted throughout much of the pandemic, preventing the kind of granular, real-time epidemiological intelligence that would have allowed local and regional authorities to make proportionate decisions. Even more troubling was the country’s lateness in expanding genomic sequencing to track emerging variants. When Delta and Omicron arrived, more transmissible, potentially more dangerous, the country was operating with a delayed and incomplete picture of the viral landscape. Looking back, this was a devastating intelligence failure in the public health sense, a failure to use the tools and knowledge already within reach.
That leads us to the data deficit. An emergency response requires data architecture, systems that aggregate, analyze, and distribute real-time information so that decisions can be made at the appropriate level of government and society. America had no such architecture. The country lacked, for instance, a national database on school closures, even as ferocious debates raged about whether those closures affected transmission rates. Schools were closed or opened based on intuition, politics, and local custom rather than on evidence. The absence of adequate, integrated data infrastructure undermined the country’s ability to mount tailored, proportionate responses to local circumstances. One of the wealthiest and most technologically sophisticated nations on earth went to war against an invisible pathogen with improvised charts and inconsistent reporting.
Why? The partisan fracture is partly to blame. The most painful and perplexing element of the American COVID failure is the one least susceptible to technical remedy: the role of politics in shaping health outcomes. Public support for health agencies’ pandemic handling was initially high across party lines. Over time, that support eroded, with declines significantly larger among Republicans. Partisan differences in compliance with public health guidance, masking, distancing, vaccination, developed into measurable differences in health outcomes. An association between political identity and COVID mortality became one of the defining and disturbing statistical signatures of the American experience.
The causation is genuinely complex. Did ordinary Americans lose confidence in public health guidance and then political leaders followed, or did political leaders withdraw their support for health agencies and pull their constituents along with them? The answer almost certainly involves both, in a reinforcing loop. Either way, the lesson is the same: a country that cannot maintain a floor of shared epistemic trust, a common factual ground on which citizens and their representatives stand, cannot mount a coherent response to a crisis that requires collective action.
Inconsistent messaging from public health officials compounded the problem. Early guidance on masks, for instance, shifted in ways that were scientifically defensible but communications-catastrophic. Clear, science-based, and consistent communication is not a soft skill in an emergency, but a primary instrument of public health policy.
What should we do?
One of the most important recommendations that serious scholars and former government officials have made, repeatedly and with increasing urgency, is one that has not been acted upon: a rigorous, bipartisan, legislatively mandated review of the American COVID experience, something analogous to the 9/11 Commission that opened the books on intelligence failures preceding the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Without such an accounting, the country is left with external analysis, journalistic reconstruction, and academic literature that, however valuable, cannot access the internal decision-making, the resource constraints, the operational tradeoffs, and the specific moments when different choices might have produced different outcomes. We know that something went wrong. We do not have authoritative clarity about exactly what, exactly when, exactly how, or exactly why.
Unfortunately, the political conditions in 2026 make that mandated review even less likely in the near term than it was a year ago.
What is the Present Danger?
Whatever partial progress had been made in shoring up America’s public health infrastructure after COVID now faces severe new pressure. The Trump administration’s proposed FY 2026 budget called for a reduction of nearly $18 billion in NIH funding, approximately a 40 percent cut, and a $3.6 billion cut to CDC, which would have reduced CDC’s total funding to roughly $4 billion. Over $11.4 billion in COVID-era public health grants were clawed back from states, localities, and community health organizations, funding that had been supporting not only pandemic response but the broader infrastructure of surveillance, laboratory capacity, emergency preparedness, and infectious disease monitoring.
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Congress, in a meaningful display of bipartisan resolve, passed a spending bill in February 2026 that President Trump signed into law, funding most of the federal government through September 2026. The legislation broadly rejected the administration’s proposed deep cuts: NIH was funded at $48.7 billion, a $415 million increase over FY 2025 levels, and CDC was funded at $9.2 billion, level with the prior year. But the institutional disruption, the departures of experienced scientists, the cancellation of ongoing research, the contraction of the state and local public health workforce, and the termination of nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research funding by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has already done damage that funding line items alone cannot immediately repair. Institutional memory is fragile. Networks of expertise take years to build and can be dismantled with a termination notice.
H5N1 avian influenza continues to spread among animal populations, including dairy cattle, and has resulted in over 70 confirmed human cases in the United States since early 2024, though sustained human-to-human transmission has not been detected. Scientists regard the continued spread and mammalian adaptation of H5N1 as a serious harbinger of pandemic potential, even as current strains have not demonstrated efficient airborne transmission between humans. Measles, effectively eliminated in the United States for decades, has re-emerged in outbreaks reflecting declining childhood vaccination rates. The pathogens are not waiting for the political calendar to resolve itself.
What does preparedness actually require?
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board’s 2025 report, The New Face of Pandemic Preparedness, anchored its recommendations in three deceptively simple imperatives: care, measure, and cooperate.
Care means, in the most fundamental sense, investing in the population’s baseline health. The gaps that COVID exposed, inadequate hospital capacity, physician shortages, limited access, the particular vulnerability of nursing homes, the racial disparities in health outcomes, are not pandemic problems. They are chronic problems that pandemics reveal and amplify. The United States cannot meaningfully prepare for the next emergency without addressing the structural inequities and access failures that characterized the last one.
Measure means building and maintaining the data architecture that allows a society to know what is happening in real time and to direct resources accordingly. This requires sustained investment in surveillance systems, genomic sequencing capacity, laboratory networks, and the information infrastructure that connects these systems to decision-makers at every level of government and public life. It requires, as the COVID experience demonstrated so painfully, a national commitment to honest data that is collected without political interference, analyzed without partisan pressure, and communicated without strategic calculation.
Cooperate operates at multiple levels simultaneously. Internationally, the adoption of the WHO Pandemic Agreement in May 2025 and the entry into force of amendments to the International Health Regulations in September 2025 represent meaningful, if fragile, progress. The Pandemic Fund, hosted by the World Bank and co-founded with WHO participation, had, as of February 2026, awarded $1.4 billion in grants through three funding rounds across 128 countries, while catalyzing over $10 billion in additional resources. These frameworks matter. They are precisely the kinds of multilateral obligations that the United States helped build, historically honored, and in some recent moments has seemed inclined to abandon.
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Domestically, cooperation means the kind of public trust that makes collective action possible. This is the hardest lesson, and in many respects the most distinctly American challenge. The United States has always been a nation of voluntary compliance, a republic in which public health, ultimately, depends on what citizens choose to do. That voluntary architecture works when trust is intact. When political identity becomes a predictor of health behavior, and health behavior becomes a predictor of mortality, the country has a problem that no laboratory network, however well-funded, can solve alone.
What is the banyan’s lesson?
America has always contended with recurring tensions, between its ideals and its institutions, its capacity and its execution, its stated commitments and its actual priorities. I have rarely seen that tension more nakedly exposed than in the COVID years.
The country spent decades building pandemic preparedness frameworks and then, when the moment came, could not fully deploy what it had built. It had the laboratories and did not test widely enough. It had the scientists and did not always listen to them. It had the vaccine infrastructure that produced, with remarkable speed, highly effective tools against a novel pathogen, one of the genuine triumphs of the period, and then allowed vaccine confidence to become a casualty of political polarization.
America is not a nation without capacity. But do we possess the institutional coherence and political will to match capacity to action when the alarm sounds? The WHO, in marking the sixth-year anniversary of the pandemic alarm, offered an assessment that could stand as an epigraph for the American situation as well: Yes and no. Yes, in many ways, better prepared. But the progress made is fragile and uneven.
The banyan does not grow tall by ignoring the storms that bent it. It grows tall by sending new roots, deeper than before, into the ground the storm tested. America has the knowledge of what failed, the data of what was lost, and the scientific heritage to do better. What it requires now is the institutional courage to look honestly at the reckoning, to conduct the audit, rebuild the systems, restore the trust, and keep faith with those who did not survive the last storm while there is still time to protect those who must face the next one.
The microbe will not wait.