In a recent article, Sandro Galea, Dean of Boston University School of Public Health, called for love, “not just to address the threat of COVID19, but to lay the foundation for a world where a disease like this cannot find its footing.” COVID-19 is the public health challenge of our time, and we have failed to learn from the hard-won progress in other countries, or be warned by their suffering, in part because of a lack of a world-embracing vision grounded in compassion. Love and compassion are at times perceived as blinkering, but in reality, it is a lack of them that has blinkered us as individuals and societies, to the real suffering we allow to occur around us, and to the global nature of the problems we face. Restructuring our societies in ways that give collective expression to compassion would not only be more just, but would do much to improve disease surveillance and prevention, by acknowledging the reality of our interconnectedness, rather than the illusion of our distance.