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When history books one day recount the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, it may well be a tale of human ingenuity and adaptiveness. Although the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, has infected more than 24 million people and left more than 800,000 dead as of this writing, the early projections of mortality were much worse.

Fears of millions of deaths by June 2020 have proven wrongnot because the disease is less lethal than anticipated, but because those fears ignored the ability of people to learn and change behaviors. Pockets of resistance against wearing masks and complying with other measures notwithstanding, the global public-health response has saved millions of lives. Increasingly, countries are restarting more aspects of normal life while keeping case numbers tenuously in check.

Yet the threat to lives and livelihoods persists. A COVID-19 vaccine may yet save the world. But even if one proves effective, it will be many months before we will have the capacity to vaccinate everyoneand there are new concerns about reinfection.herapeutics such as dexamethasone and remdesivir appear to provide important benefits for those with severe cases but are not alone sufficient to stop deaths from COVID-19.

New therapies are possible but by no means guaranteed. Countries will very likely need to plan for almost another year during which public-health measures are their primary tools for saving lives. In the meantime, the world cannot be idle. Societies have been upended, causing unprecedented disruption to economies, education systems, and the day-to-day lives of people everywhere. And as we and others have argued, saving lives and opening societies is a false trade-off.

In that area, too, our ability to learn and adapt is proving dispositive. Countries that have successfully reduced their number of COVID-19 cases have generally been more successful at reopening their economies. For them, controlling the virus ultimately has come down to two things: understanding what to do and executing well. Both have been challenging at various points. For example, the evidence base for the population-wide use of masks only became compelling a few months into the pandemic response. In contrast, the importance of testing has been clear from the earliest days, but many countries have faced operational challenges in ramping up their capacity.

While there is much more to learn, this article summarizes what response leaders have discovered so far about what to do and how to do it. Every jurisdiction is doing some of these things; none of them are new for experts in infectious diseases. But we have tried to describe specific considerations for practitioners looking to adopt and adapt best practices to their management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the outsize role that businesses are taking in the crisis response in numerous countries, many of the ideas are as relevant to private-sector leaders as to those in the public sector. Interventions are divided into three categoriesdetecting disease, reducing the number of new cases, and limiting mortalityand can be tailored for specific populations and settings manpower.