Is Greater Boston ready for the next pandemic? below?

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Local health experts say Greater Boston is generally more prepared for the pandemic than in 2020, but headwinds are still there.

by Abby Patkin

March 21, 2025 | 11:26am

6 minutes to read

Five years after Covid-19 outbreak, after scrambling the world, global health leaders say another pandemic Not that case, but when.

Is Greater Boston ready? It's complicated, local health experts say, but the Covid-19 pandemic offers something like a roadmap.

“I think one of the important things we learned is that we are, unfortunately, not ready for a pandemic, an emergency of that magnitude,” said Dr. Bisora ​​Ozicz, a public health commissioner in Boston. “And that's what we need to grow and strengthen our public health infrastructure and direct service delivery.”

It's hard to say how a region will take on another pandemic without knowing a particular pathogen, but “we're more prepared than we are,” Ozicz said. She pointed to efforts to expand public health capabilities, community outreach and data sharing.

“As time goes by, I think just looking around the country is low and there's a lot of investment in public health,” Ozicz said. “And I think that's one of the main points that came out of this, and that means we need to build our capabilities and capacity to prepare ourselves if something similar happens in the future.”

Dr. Paul Bidding, the chief preparation and continuity officer for the popular general Brigham, said today's healthcare infrastructure has its strengths and weaknesses.

“From my perspective, if you look at the place we are currently in the preparations for our pandemic, I think it's a really complicated picture,” he said. “We learned so many lessons.”

Meanwhile, medical and public health leaders have nurtured collaborations during the Covid-19 pandemic, arranged testing sites, expanded hospital capabilities, and quickly followed effective vaccines and treatments.

“Never developed a vaccine for the pandemic Less than 4 years Previously, we did it with less than one using mRNA vaccines and other technologies.

Through this, healthcare workers struggled “be brave and tirelessly.”

“We've learned that we can do things really difficult,” she said. “We learned as much from success as we learned from failure.”

Lessons from Covid-19

“The overarching theme in terms of what we have and what we need to do better is that we have been preparing for the pandemic for decades, and we knew we needed to prepare.

An important part of that plan was to maintain similarities in normalcy in everyday life.

“The importance of keeping children in school, the importance of balancing the harmful harms of closing people's business, livelihoods, lives and social fabrics,” Delon explained. “We really abandoned… these important aspects of society are too long.”

According to Biddinger, one of the hospital's most important lessons was the need to balance surge activities along with ongoing medical care (for example, creating a new intensive care bed). Pandemic, early hospitals cancel Many non-essential appointments and procedures are consistent.

“For the subsequent waves and continually, we think it's really dynamic about how we try and balance the need to make sure we're looking after patients with pandemics, but we're also caring for other patients,” Biddinger says.

He said it would be encouraging to know that the healthcare system can “do big things really quickly” but he said the system is facing some serious headwinds.

“Unfortunately, we know that we are now in a tougher place with a healthcare system than we were before the pandemic,” Biddinger says. “We are more crowded as a healthcare system than before the pandemic. Capacity is putting more strain on it.”

He added that the healthcare supply chain remains vulnerable with relatively few surge capabilities.

Overcoming skepticism

Another long-lasting takeaway from the response to the Covid-19 pandemic is a loss of trust in public health, according to Doron.

“How did we lose that public's trust? We lost it by not properly communicating uncertainty, and by exaggerating certain things,” Delon argued. For example, she said she needs to explain the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine more clearly to the public.

“We had to be more agile as things were changing and become more honest and transparent about what those changes mean,” added Delon.

Overcoming that skepticism is easier than that.

“Five years are, in many ways, blinking the eyes,” Deron said. “What I'm watching, what I'm hearing on this kind of fifth anniversary is still a lot of rage about some of the things that have happened.”

She said that when it comes to taking precautions, public health leaders need to prioritize ensuring that people feel a sense of control over their lives to some extent.

“I really think we need to understand how to get to a place where there are goals other than eradication of them and that we are allowed to balance those goals with the many other priorities people have,” Delon said.

As Biddinger stated, “Skepticism is both a challenge and an opportunity,” he said health leaders need to continue to think about ways to communicate risks and “respond to changes in science faster than they can during the pandemic.”

“Indeed, in a pandemic, you can't know all the facts at the beginning,” Bidding admitted. “That's why we have to do good science. So we have to do good research. But as data emerges, we have to act on changing science and data and communicate it effectively to the public.

Looking ahead

As big Boston prepares for the pandemic, federal uncertainty will heavily in some parts of the healthcare system. President Donald Trump proposed Fund reduction Medicaid at the National Institutes of Health and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., current secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is worth noting. Vaccine skeptics.

“I have expertise [to respond to another pandemic]Deron said. “We have knowledge, we have protocols, we have infrastructure. What worries me most is… are we funding and resources? Will the federal government continue to prepare for the pandemic as long as it needs to be funded to respond quickly to the next threat?”

Ojikutu said Boston's public health leaders are concerned about the Trump administration's proposed funding cuts, but she said the Boston Public Health Commission is in a stronger position.

“So we feel confident that we are stable and we can continue to work and continue to build and strengthen our infrastructure in preparation for future events and emergencies,” Ozicz said.

According to Biddinger, the healthcare system will do its best to adapt to what comes next.

“I think public health and healthcare professionals have to always work in the system they have,” he said. “They have to use the resources they have available to them. They have to adapt to what the population expects and how they communicate.”

Meanwhile, as experts plan the next public health crisis, lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic loom may always be the case.

“We are celebrating the fifth anniversary of the communal pandemic, so people should know that there are many people trying to ensure that all the lessons that have come out of this pandemic are captured.

Abby Patkin is a general challenge news reporter that touches on public transport, crime, health and everything in between.