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The COVID-19 outbreak is not the first nor last series of recent real or potential catastrophes - be they natural disasters, terrorist attacks or pandemics - that have taken by surprise governments, globalised firms and the citizenry. 1Yet, due to its near-unprecedented impact on the highly interconnected but vulnerable systems that define the modern world, this pandemic has been testing our ability to govern risk more than any other crisis before. The last time the world responded to a global emerging disease epidemic of the scale of the current novel coronavirus without having access to vaccines was the 1918-1919 H1N1 influenza pandemic. 2Ironically, the measures mobilised today to counter COVID-19 - the so-called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” 3- are essentially the same as those deployed a century ago, and that despite significant social, technological as well as governance differences between 1918 and today. 4

COVID-19 is a matter of common European interest since its very first detection on the continent. Yet this pandemic outbreak has largely been handled as an essentially national matter.This article makes a first attempt at unpacking how such fragmented, uncoordinated national responses to COVID19 came into being under the EU legal order. To do so, it systematizes the European response into separate stages. Phase 1 – the emergency – has been characterized by the adoption of national emergency risk management measures that, albeit country specific, were inspired by a common objective of pandemic suppression, i.e. to reduce disease transmission and thereby diminishing pressure on health services, under the by now well-known ‘flatten the curve’ imperative. Phase 2 – the lifting – is about the attempt at relaxing some of the national risk responses in a coordinated fashion to avoid creating negative spillovers or distortions – be they sanitary and/or financial – across the Union.The article argues that contrary to conventional wisdom the resulting uncoordinated EU response to Covid-19 shouldn’t be seen as the inevitable consequence of the EU’s limited competence in public health. Against this backdrop, it strives to define the regulatory policy framework that might be governing the next phases of the European risk management response to this pandemic as they will emerge from a widely undefined yet unescapable dialectic between the Union and its member states. Ultimately, it predicts that by testing the outer limits of the EU public health competence COVID-19 is set to go down in history as a major catalyst in the advancement of EU health emergency action.