The profound failure of much of the world’s public health infrastructure during the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the loss of tens of millions of jobs and untold financial losses for both families and businesses.
The science of public health, and those working in the profession who are responsible for detecting, preventing, and responding to infectious diseases including contagious pathogens such as CoV-SARS-2, have not responded when the world was most in need.
By contrast, healthcare professionals have been the heroes of the pandemic. Physicians, nurses, clinicians, and hundreds of thousands of support staff have put their lives at risk to save the lives of others.
Sadly, a lack of investment by governments across North America and western Europe as well as dysfunction among the world’s leading public health organizations has resulted in a substantial failure to protect the world’s population. The problem has been made more complicated because leadership from every nation’s chief executive is required in moments of public health crisis.
For the global business community, the public health infrastructure is as vital as is the transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure. Just as the presence of the US Navy in the western Pacific for the past century – the national defense infrastructure – has assured the functioning of global supply chains – making consumer products plentiful and cheap – defending the health of workers and their families is vital for economic success.
Many Asian nations realized the importance of leadership and public health at the outset of the pandemic. Nations such as Australia, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan acted quickly and repeatedly to gain widespread compliance with healthy practices and control COVID-19 infection. Strong national leadership has been highly correlated with successful infection management. Germany is another case in point.
While some European leaders have provided forceful leadership, in the US, UK, Russia and Brazil leaders have largely failed to prevent the infection’s spread. Making matters worse, many public health professions, despite their own predictions of the likelihood of a global pandemic, believed that wealth hardens societies against epidemics. Western quality of life – food, housing, water and healthcare – was thought to be effective in preventing pandemics in the developed world.
When the pandemic did arrive, the public health infrastructure lacked the necessary protective gear and materials for testing. Shockingly, many public health leaders and nearly all political leaders failed to appreciate how rapidly the virus would spread. Conflict among the leading governmental agencies responsible for managing the pandemic – the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control – further slowed the response.
The current pandemic should not have been considered a surprise. It is the eighth such threat the world has faced in 17 years. SARS-Cov-1 appeared in 2003 while strains of the Avian flu created significant pandemic threat in both 2004 and 2005. In June 2009, the WHO declared the new strain of swine-origin H1N1 as the first 21st century pandemic.
Since 2012, an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus has affected several Middle Eastern countries, while the 2013 – 2016 Western African Ebola virus epidemic was the most widespread outbreak in history. In early 2015, a widespread epidemic, caused by the Zika virus in Brazil, spread to other parts of South and North America as well as several islands in the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.
In addition, the current SARS-Cov-2 pandemic was foreshadowed by a 2015 TED Talk given by Bill Gates as well as by a 2019 US Directorate of National Intelligence report.
Perhaps the greatest failing has been the lack of a testing infrastructure. Testing is necessary, not only for the health of individual patients, but also to track, monitor, and predict the shifting outbreak profile. The required processes and procedures are well known, but governments have generally failed to make the necessary investment.
The science of public health has a long and successful history. Most cities, towns, states and provinces long ago established the needed capabilities. Successful public health initiatives have included the delivery of vaccinations for polio and tuberculosis, smoking cessation, and the control of STDs. With the recognition the current coronavirus is not the first and very likely not the last the world will face, advocacy from the global business community is clearly needed to minimize the possibility of repeated disaster.
Martin Fleming's Blog 