We take advantage of a 2003 general-population choice-experiment survey of U.S. residents designed to determine people’s willingness to bear the costs of public policies to reduce illnesses and avoid premature deaths in their communities. We re-estimate earlier models, omitting all respondent-specific individual characteristics and adding new county-level data on a variety of contextual variables circa 2003. Then we transfer our re-estimated model to the context of the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic, substituting 2020-era levels of the contextual variables, including county-level household incomes and unemployment rates. We calculate the model’s implied values of what would have been people’s ex-ante willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid numbers of generic cases and deaths equal to the actual monthly totals of cases and deaths during March 2020 to April 2021, by county and month, for the conterminous U.S. states. Our estimated aggregate WTP across the U.S. adult population from March 2020 to April 2021 is about 3 trillion dollars. These estimates are a lower bound because the original choice scenarios pertained to non-infectious illnesses and accidents, rather than pandemic illness. Our models reveal that WTP for public health policies to reduce illness and avert deaths is greater for people from counties with higher proportions of adults in labor force and counties with a higher proportion of Blacks residents. People from counties with higher income and higher health access also tend to have higher WTP to reduce the risks to public health. If preferences over public health programs, conditional on context, remained relatively stable over time, our findings may be relevant for predicting contemporary willingness to bear the costs of public health measures, either retrospectively for the current pandemic, or prospectively for future pandemics. (This paper featured as one chapter in Shan Zhang’s 2023 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Oregon.)