Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

by Debora MacKenzie

What had also happened was that after abandoning its efforts to conceal SARS, China launched mass mobilization to contain the virus, confining Beijing students to dorms and spending more than $1 billion refurbishing hospitals and finding and isolating cases. Sound familiar? The abrupt shift from downplaying the outbreak to a no-holds-barred response was eerily similar to what happened with Covid-19.

Huang wrote in 2004 that Guangdong health officials initially recognized the new disease as a virus and alerted authorities—but the law made any infectious disease outbreak a state secret until the health ministry announced it, so they couldn’t tell anyone else. Then there were bureaucratic delays at the ministry, some because of the Lunar New Year holiday, until February 11th.

On the day the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic in 2020, the agency complained about countries that still wouldn’t test people who had no contact with a known case, China, or another early place that had the disease, even though it was clear the virus was spreading far more widely. It seems little has changed.

Will we ever learn to test all not just the ones with contact or traveling from certain areas?

The world was not prepared for Covid-19, and it is not prepared for pandemics generally. “In spite of all our ‘alarmist’ outcries in the past for better pandemic preparedness, we are now starting to prepare when the house is on fire,” says Ab Osterhaus.

The US tried to improve matters. It spent $1 billion on detection labs and preparedness plans in developing countries, as required by the International Health Regulations; stockpiled protective equipment and set up networks of hospitals in the US primed to respond to a pandemic; and created an office in the White House to plan and lead the response, the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. All three, wrote Kirchhoff, were underfunded or shut down under the Trump administration. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the pandemic plan written by the Obama administration was largely ignored.

Even where there were plans, and even if they were followed, they were mostly devised for flu, which as we have seen is different from Covid-19 in many ways. Containment doesn’t work for fast-spreading flu, but as China showed, it works for Covid-19. The WHO delayed calling Covid-19 a pandemic partly because they feared countries would abandon containment and testing and rush straight to flu-inspired social distancing—and for some countries, it may have been right about that.

“For too long, we have allowed a cycle of panic and neglect when it comes to pandemics: we ramp up efforts when there is a serious threat, then quickly forget about them when the threat subsides. It is well past time to act.”

Sad that we haven’t learned from all the pandemics in the past.

But the fundamental problem was the first delay, and that was failed surveillance. The IHR requires countries to tell the WHO about any outbreak that is serious, unusual, or could trigger international travel or trade restrictions. That applied to Covid-19, and China did tell the WHO about it, but there are no provisions allowing the WHO to inspect the situation on the ground to see if the declaration is true—for instance, whether the infection really wasn’t spreading between people.

if it’s worth investing $49 billion a year to ensure you can respond to an improbably successful nuclear attack, surely we could invest in improving our response to an increasingly probable pandemic. Yet this year, the whole world will spend only $2.4 billion, 5 percent of the annual cost of the US nuclear deterrent, on the WHO.

So, lesson for the future number 1: we need a high-level, authoritative system bringing countries and international agencies together to collaborate on disease, so that no one conceals important details about worrying outbreaks and everyone works together from the beginning.

Lesson for the future number 6: we need to hold governments accountable for their promises, now, to do all this. Actually, this lesson is one we should act on now. The G20 group of the world’s richest countries promised to take action on pandemics in late March 2020, including holding a joint meeting of finance and health ministers “in the coming months” to create “a universal, efficient, sustained funding and coordination platform to accelerate the development and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics and treatments.”

100% agree but how to do this when a country’s current leadership denies existence or the need for this to be worked on

As Covid-19 emerged, one local bureaucracy delayed the warning—and there was no international agency that could go in and verify what was happening on the ground, immediately, on behalf of everyone else. Then we didn’t have the global public health infrastructure to ensure every country’s response was adequate, even though inadequate response in any country could mean increased infection in others.

Needs to change