Discussions of COVID-19 often cast the Global South as the tragic victim of an imminent surge in cases. Doctors and public health experts have lamented the weak health systems in the Global South—there are fewer than 130 ICU beds in Haiti and perhaps only 500 ventilators for 190 million people in Nigeria. However, this focus on tertiary care, while justified, neglects the lessons that places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has battled many epidemics before, could teach the United States about how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

A neighbor in her seventies or eighties paused last week when she saw my husband playing in the garden with our four-year old daughter, in the lockdown we now face. She told him that she was on her way to have her one daily cigarette—no doubt medically inadvisable, but why not have a small pleasure now?—and that she was thinking about how the world had changed with “the virus.” And then she said, “you know, I think that there are birds chirping now in Beijing, people can breathe the air better in Rome and Madrid.