I just talked to a friend, a federal gov't epidemiologist specialising in respiratory infections. She's been on #COVID19 from the earliest days.

"Why are we even doing this?", she asked. "It's clear nobody cares, but what's worse is that nobody really seems to have cared." ()

"I thought we did this whole thing to fix things. Everybody was proud to proclaim how we're all in this together, but it all seems like a fad now, and people are on to the next."

These are pretty raw words from someone much younger and much less cynical about the world than me.

Public health is cultural. By that, I mean it's an extensive, coherent whole of values. As a society, we're shockingly ill-equipped to manage cultural issues when everything is so incredibly ephemeral. By the time you start to think a particular way, the news cycle flips.

I worry. Every death is tragic but they don't have to be senselessly tragic. Yet our inability to learn from this pandemic shows that even 120,000 dead later, we still haven't learned the lesson. This bodes ill for the coming pandemic – and I'll guarantee you, one is coming.

Without disrespecting any of the suffering that COVID-19 has caused, there are much, much worse things out there, including things that aren't in the much-touted 'playbook' of the Obama administration. Rapid habitat loss by reservoir hosts puts us closer to viruses than ever.

The GHS approach to managing this has by now pretty much failed, multilateralism is on the decline through largely self-inflicted wounds by the WHO and we've got no health diplomacy agenda. We're as exposed as one gets.

In such situations, social cohesion is the last line of defence, and the constant call for 'leadership' just highlights how enamoured America is with the cheapest substitute for social cohesion. Every issue in this pandemic boils down not to leadership but cohesion.

These are existential issues, and unless we find a way to manage them, we'll be hopelessly exposed the next time a pandemic strikes.