Conclusion: Our Pandemic Future

The textbook conclusion uses the May 7, 2022 White House Correspondents' Dinner, attended by 2,600 guests where some contracted SARS-CoV-2, to illustrate the role of personal risk assessment in an individual's behavior choices two years into the global COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter explores the components of personal risk assessments and their interconnectedness to social responsibility in an interconnected world. Finally, the chapter discusses emerging infectious diseases likely to arise in the future, diseases eliminated in the twentieth century that are now re-emerging, and the fundamental shifts that COVID-19 has invoked in our conception of infectious disease threats. The White House Correspondents' Dinner is a 100-year-old Washington, DC tradition bringing together journalists, politicians, celebrities, and the President for an evening of light-hearted fun. A personal risk assessment calls for carefully evaluating one's individual level of vulnerability, determining the likelihood of viral transmission for any gathering, and ensuring one's currency with vaccinations and boosters. Personal risk assessment is focused on an individual's understanding of their own likelihood of being exposed to and contracting a disease. Personal risk assessment must answer the question of what we need for ourselves; social responsibility must examine the question of what we owe to others. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals have balanced their personal risk assessment with their sense of social responsibility to varying degrees. Since then, monkeypox has been largely confined to African countries, but in the true fashion of EIDs, monkeypox developed recently in the non-endemic locations of Australia, Europe, and the United States.