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Human societies are themselves tangled layered networks of human, biological, and technological systems. In the last decade alone, these networks have experienced massive shock events in the form of natural disasters, infrastructure failures, and pandemics. These events will only continue and will likely include unexpected new forms of shocks in the future. Researchers across disparate disciplines have recently begun to investigate resilience in society, and how our built systems contribute to or degrade it, but there has not yet been an attempt to field a system informed by resilience research in a relevant real-world setting. This paper describes an effort to bolster the capabilities of public health work by using resilience engineering principles to generate a new extra-organizational capability amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This new capability attempts to engage the public as a part of a societal scale team engaged in a joint activity to identify positive COVID-19 cases. Our work reveals insights about is required to generate new non-standard capabilities for the benefit of society. These, in turn, reveal some of the dynamics of a society enduring a critical disruption, which future work into societal resilience will need to consider to be successful.