The new Bill Gates book on pandemic prevention will come out in two days, and I believe it should be of interest to the community. You can read the presentation blog post and an excerpt.
The central idea in the summary of the book is to have a team of dedicated experts from a variety of backgrounds, called the Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization (GERM) team dedicated to surveillance, to make sure any infectious disease that appears can be contained within the first 100 days, and avoid becoming a pandemic.
Not entirely related: I took a very brief Google search and found this article, which is opinionated, non-positive but also sort of a mainstream take by the left (the magazine is literally called Jacobin).
I guess the point of showing this article is that it illustrates the interactions and complexities involved when an individual, even 100% altruistically, executes complex public activity.