The Covid-19 pandemic has given the world a painful primer on the power of exponential growth.

On December 30, 2019, per the World Health Organization, there were two confirmed cases of what would become known as Covid-19. One week later, there were 46. A week after that, 134. A week after that, 2,028. A week after that, 14,565. By the beginning of March, the cumulative global caseload had hit six digits, and by the end of March it was over a million.

Exact numbers that early in the pandemic — when tests were often hard to obtain — are shaky, but the picture is clear: Covid-19 went from being a very small problem affecting a handful of patients to a widespread pandemic at alarming speed.

That’s the particular danger of a contagious respiratory pandemic — the more time that passes before you can mount an effective response, the faster outbreaks will get out of hand and the more painful it will be to bring it back under control.

But the flip side of exponential growth is that being able to intervene early gives us the opportunity to prevent the next pathogen with the pandemic potential of SARS-CoV-2 from wreaking the same kind of havoc on the world. That, more than anything else, is the key lesson from Covid: We need to go faster. One estimate in May 2020 found that instituting social distancing policies just two weeks earlier in March of that year could have prevented about 83 percent of deaths in the US up to early May, potentially saving tens of thousands of people.

Speed mattered for more than social distancing. Vaccines saved 1.1 million lives by the end of November 2021, according to one estimate, and effective Covid-19 treatments have saved many others. But while the Covid-19 vaccines were developed in record time — Moderna’s mRNA shot took just a weekend for its initial design — and extraordinary, innovative studies found effective treatments quickly as well, neither was fast enough to outrun the virus’s exponential growth.

Covid-19 will not be the last disease with the potential to grow into a pandemic. To fight the next one, we need to have a game plan to speed up the search for and deployment of vaccines and treatments. Such a plan would launch research and development efforts targeting pathogens with pandemic potential, stand up an infrastructure to accelerate the testing of candidate vaccines and antivirals, and pump funding into both.

Read the full article about preparing for the next pandemic by Dylan Matthews at Vox.