If we begin to give thought to considerations of ethics and fairness only when we encounter shortages in the filling of prescriptions or the use of hospital facilities then we are likely to be acting merely to limit, or to make up for harm already inflicted on people because of their unmet healthcare needs. Our effort to respond justly to people’s emergency health care needs may be too late already at that point. But, using timely preventive measures, or simply well‐directed dissemination of information, health problems that send people to emergency rooms can be avoided in the first place. These can even be addressed much earlier by attending to social determinants of health. There is nothing new about this observation, but the reiteration is timely because the emergency we are facing makes it easier to focus on basic principles of public healthcare. The effort to promote healthcare fairness, guided by the principle of prioritization of the worst off, has to be planned across various stages leading up to emergencies. Steps taken to promote fairness at the time of an emergency can easily be a merely remedial measure that ought to have been preempted by proper allocation initiatives way before the existence of an emergency. This paper discusses the fairness of allocation measures in relation to the dispensing of adequate information, the provision of isolation and quarantine facilities, the availability of healthcare services and providers, and the criteria for triage in the hospital setting.