Creating a New Normal with a New Global Public Health System ,” said modern dance legend Liz Lerman. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that there would be no going back to normal. They knew a failure to make timely and accurate public health decisions for a pandemic would prove to be the “difference between life and death.” How correct they were. The problem: Global pandemics without a global public health management system In the early stages of COVID-19, major public health decisions in the United States for prevention and preparedness were not made by public health experts. Instead, the experts were systematically ignored, removed, and taken over by political and economically driven decision-makers. Because of this, at the outset of the pandemic, traditional hospital and community-based health providers—trained to diagnose and manage individual patients—were increasingly faced with rapidly emerging and widely expanding public health and triage decisions that impacted large populations well beyond their local community. Population-based management systems refer to the engagement and coordination of social and structural factors that focus on whole communities, states and entire nations, rather than individuals. Traditional health providers were not trained to work at this scale.