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If zero Covid is impossible, what are the implications for humanity if we truly do get a pandemic with a high mortality rate?
I think that a lot of pandemic preparedness scenarios are for that exact situation, so many of the existing plans were way over the top for something weak like Covid. That being said, even a totalitarian state's failure to prevent the spread despite massive measures is quite frightening.
The only NPI which really seemed consistently effective at stopping the spread of Covid was rigidly enforced border controls. It's rather telling that Covid hawks, outside of praising China, routinely touted the effectiveness of the approaches taken by Australia and New Zealand. The restrictions enacted by these countries were not dramatically different from those in blue states or European countries, and what differences they did have were a matter of degree and duration rather than anything game-changingly qualitative. Where they differ is that they enacted strict border controls early on and were able to enforce them by virtue of being geographically isolated islands without land borders. Covid hawks were keen to ignore this crucial last point, as it undermined a key tenet of their faith (that lockdowns are both extremely effective when implemented properly*, and equally effective in every region). It's more comfortable to attribute NZ's success in flattening the curve to Jacinta Ardern's #girlboss energy than to acknowledge the obvious point that border controls exist for a reason.
Lesson 1: if you're scared of future pandemics, marry a Kiwi bird and sharpish.
Lesson 2 is that the only other thing which really put a dent in Covid hospitalisation and fatality rates was mass vaccination. So we have to start rolling out vaccines faster than now. Operation Warp Speed made vaccines available faster than the FDA standard, but in a crisis that still won't be fast enough. The lesson of AIDS may be instructive: in the 80s when AIDS was a death sentence, the desperate young men dying in droves were willing to take a chance on just about any experimental treatment, no matter how much of a long shot, and my understanding is that this risk calculus was tacitly endorsed by the medical establishment. The proposed vaccines for New!Pathogen don't have to prove efficacy: they have to prove they won't kill or maim you, then we can start administering them in clinics to people who are sufficiently scared of New!Pathogen that they'll try treatments explicitly advertised as experimental and unproven. Do regular follow-ups which are tabulated in an internationally accessible database (like VAERS) and whittle away the wheat (the effective vaccine candidates) from the chaff (the ones that do more harm than good or which are harmless but don't stop you contracting it, being hospitalised with it or dying from it).
For what it's worth, the approach actually adopted by most Western governments in combating Covid was quite far removed from those same governments' pandemic preparedness plans, many of which were published a year or two prior to March 2020.
*"when implemented properly" is a moving target usually determined post hoc: whenever lockdowns fail at their stated goal, the public is blamed for selfishly failing to abide by them, regardless of whether any evidence exists that noncompliance was common.
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The Black Death killed something like 25% of Europe’s population with no way to prevent it.
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