Scientific and public health experts have been raising the alarm for decades, imploring public officials to prepare for the inevitability of a viral pandemic. Infectious epidemics seemingly as benign as “the flu” and as deadly as the Ebola virus provided ample warning, yet government officials seemed caught off guard and ill prepared for dealing with COVID-19. Three future-oriented researchers and policy experts map out an “Epidemiological Blueprint for Understanding the Dynamics of a Pandemic.”