The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the world’s first modern public health crisis — Zika, Ebola, SARS, MERS and HIV preceded it. Yet its rapid spread, global reach and repeated waves have changed the world in ways that are impossible to have imagined 16 months ago. Nearly 4 million people have died from the virus. Now, epidemiologists are already preparing for the next pandemic, trying to predict where and how it might emerge and developing the tools we need to combat it better than how we tackled COVID-19. Today’s Daily Dose lifts the curtain on that race against time.