Abstract
Introduction
The 2022 Preparedness Summit held a series of 8 COVID-19-specific listening sessions to better understand the experiences of the public health workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic and to discuss lessons learned. The goal of these sessions was to share knowledge that could inform future planning efforts, policy development, and national health security strategy efforts. To extend these conversations beyond the summit and to contribute to a growing body of knowledge about the pandemic and its impact on public health preparedness, the National Association of County and City Health Officials and Health Security organized a journal supplement with papers focused on reimagining US public health preparedness. The aim of the supplement was to consider how the COVID-19 pandemic is transforming public health preparedness policy and practice and to discuss what public health preparedness needs to look like in the future. 1 The response to the call for papers for the supplement was overwhelming. This special feature is a subset of articles submitted to the supplement that address what has been learned about systems of various kinds that were involved in the COVID-19 pandemic response.
The 6 papers in this special feature view systems in diverse ways, but together they tell a story of successes and challenges in the management of the COVID-19 response. The papers explore (1) the challenges several different academic medical centers faced in increasing surge capacity during the height of the pandemic, 2 (2) how Zambia and Tanzania used different approaches to improve vaccination access and decrease hesitancy, 3 (3) how early detection of novel pathogens in emergency departments can be aided by a national network for metagenomic next-generation sequencing, 4 (4) how the University of Oklahoma convened a broad group of stakeholders to draft policy recommendation to improve future pandemic preparedness, 5 (5) how scholars in Taiwan proposed the creation of a rapid ethical assessment taskforce to guide ethically fraught issues that arise in a pandemic response, 6 and (6) how infection prevention programs must be made sustainable to enable effective pandemic response. 7
These papers, along with many other innovative ideas discussed in the supplement, provide rich food for thought as the public health policy community works to improve pandemic preparedness and response for the future.