Abstract
•In the past hundred years, the world has faced four distinctly different pandemics: the Spanish flu of 1918-1919, the SARS pandemic of 2003, the H1N1 or “swine flu” pandemic of 2012, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Each public health crisis exposed specific systemic shortfalls and provided public health lessons for future events.
•The Spanish flu revealed a nursing shortage and led to a great appreciation of nursing as a profession. SARS showed the importance of having frontline clinicians be able to work with regulators and those producing guidelines.
•H1N1 raised questions about the nature of a global organization such as the World Health Organization (WHO) in terms of the benefits and potential disadvantages of leading the fight against a long-term global public health threat. In the era of COVID-19, it seems apparent that we are learning about both the blessing and curse of social media.
•The authors did not include the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) among the pandemics although it is sometimes described as a pandemic. It began in 2014 and cases have been reported every year since then, but usually in a geographically limited area and never more than 500 per year.
