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As social distancing became norm and law in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, people turned to video teleconferencing to meet with friends and family, attend religious services, and go on dates. Zoom work accounts became a conduit for maintaining nonwork social ties, and as people came to depend on this enterprise tool, Zoom's stock valuation soared.1 The pandemic has widened the sphere of life dependent on such market technologies, heightening existing questions around the political, legal, and economic governance of these companies. How should the fabric of social life, especially as it is rewoven by the pandemic, relate to the private ownership of telecommunications?

Some have taken a stab at putting the pandemic in historical context. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Washington Post visualized the devastating plagues of history, with Covid-19 by comparison a tiny dot. (By today, tragically, it'd be a much bigger dot.) This vivid graphic ranks Covid-19 the ninth deadliest in history

Thinking and interacting, intellectually, are essential in solving mankind's problems, such as the pandemic now engulfing our existence. In doing so, however, we need to remain vigilant to the possibility of making mistakes that could lead us to wrong conclusions. Recall

COVID-19 is a wicked problem for policy makers internationally as the complexity of the pandemic transcends health, environment, social and economic boundaries. Many countries are focusing on two key responses, namely virus containment and financial measures, but fail to recognise other aspects. The systems approach, however, enables policy makers to design the most effective strategies and reduce the unintended consequences. To achieve fundamental change, it is imperative to firstly identify the "right" interventions (leverage points) and implement additional measures to reduce negative consequences. To do so, a preliminary causal loop diagram of the COVID-19 pandemic was designed to explore its influence on socio-economic systems. In order to transcend the "wait and see" approach, and create an adaptive and resilient system, governments need to consider "deep" leverage points that can be realistically maintained over the long-term and cause a fundamental change, rather than focusing on "shallow" leverage points that are relatively easy to implement but do not result in significant systemic change

One of the most striking developments during the early months of the pandemic was the way state competition quickly took over. Always heralded as a textbook case of the need for global cooperation, pandemics turned out to be prime examples of global competition, albeit in an indirect and gamified version.

This virus wasn't something we knew nothing about. There was so much we knew, from day one, including because of SARS, the previous almost-pandemic that was also a similar coronavirus. We could have used that vital pre-information better if we had matched the requisite epistemic humility that a pandemic requires-an acknowledgement that we aren't certain of anything-with an insistence that this situation wasn't a blank slate. We could have utilized our prior knowledge to plan ahead, while not letting go of the uncertainty-taking thoughtful steps but without overstating our confidence.

People the world over have acquired a passing familiarity with epidemic models, critical threshold values for transmission (R0), comorbidities, and exponential growth. But these insights into the pandemic are like Harrison's H1-3; they focus on a few elements of the problem. The pandemic is every bit as much a problem of the non-linear dynamics of markets, the cognitive biases of decision-makers, the collective dynamics of groups, and the coevolution of biological species - humans, mammalian food sources, and viral agents.

Globally, the USA has recorded the highest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,1 and still needs to simultaneously respond to another looming potential pandemic. The rise in multidrug-resistant bacterial infections that are undetected, undiagnosed, and increasingly untreatable threatens the health of people in the USA and globally. In 2020 and beyond, we cannot afford to ignore antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Part of pandemic preparedness is acknowledging that human, wildlife, and ecological health are inseparable.