India’s response to COVID-19 has been robust, helping it check spread better than many countries. Several measures, from surveillance to tests across labs, are derived from lessons learnt from earlier epidemics, including 1994 plague and last year’s Nipah. While the current pandemic is unprecedented, considering the scale of the ensuing countrywide lockdown, India has battled several epidemic situations, with each testing the country’s health systems — from the suspected pneumonic plague of September 1994 to the Nipah outbreaks of 2018 and 2019, besides the pandemic influenza H1N1, bird flu or A(H5N1), the Zika virus outbreak, as well as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus or MERS, Congo fever and a few others.