How Can The Next Pandemics Be Avoided?

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has been the first in history broadcast to the minute by the media, the internet and social networks.

However, the immediacy has not served to take effective measures in time. What can be done so that it does not repeat itself? Will COVID-19 teach us to face other challenges, such as the climate emergency?

The arrival of the virus in Europe caught governments with a different foot. Some countries announced that they would take all the necessary containment measures (Italy, Spain …), giving the appearance of control, but immediately the situation got out of hand.

Others (United Kingdom, United States, Sweden …) said that they would let the virus do so for the population to be immunized, assuming the cost in human lives, but ended up taking similar emergency measures in the face of the foreseeable avalanche of sickness and deaths.

Should the economy or health be prioritized?

The reaction of nations proved that few had effective response mechanisms to a virus whose emergence was predictable – we had the experience of SARS (2002), H1N1 (2009) and MERS (2012).

In addition, governments felt gripped by the risk of destabilizing the economy, which is often their main concern.

Now epidemiologists and governments are wondering what to do next time. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose opinion is valued by international leaders, advises investing in science and health means for the early detection of viruses and the development of vaccines and treatments.

It proposes rethinking healthcare globally rather than nationally to provide doctors with what they need, help countries with fewer resources, and create a global economic safety net to assist underprivileged countries and sectors.

The problem is how to finance all this with the current organization of the economy. Economist Thomas Piketty hopes the pandemic will convince governments of the need to direct and plan the economy to meet the needs of the people rather than leave this task to the markets.

How are we going to face climate change?

We do not know when we will have to face a new pandemic. But we do know that we are already in the middle of a climate emergency that we are not yet solving.

Harari adds that the same kind of logic would serve to fight climate change. It is necessary to invest more in health and in reducing CO2 emissions.

According to Harari, it would be enough to invest 2% of the world’s gross domestic product to avoid the consequences of climate change. Otherwise, the same thing will happen to us as with the COVID-19 pandemic: we will have reacted late.

We have some good examples

The experts (from the WHO to the epidemiologists at the forefront of the alert services in each country) and the governments that have reacted late and often badly claim that they have not been able to do otherwise due to ignorance about the virus.

However, the truth is that there have been scientists and countries that have acted in time and have avoided suffering and tens of thousands of deaths.

In Japan, the government did not take great measures of confinement, only closed schools in affected areas, but citizens knew that they should put on masks, wash their hands and take extreme precautions, something they are used to doing normally.

In South Korea, the control of the disease has been based on the use of masks and the massive performance of diagnostic tests that has allowed an exhaustive follow-up of the sick and the infected, including the asymptomatic.

They have also used mobile applications that allowed close communication between health services and citizens, and that also alerted users of the proximity of affected people.

The entire Korean system developed when they felt threatened by MERS, a lesson that other nations ignored.

In Germany there has been a much lower number of affected people and deaths than in Spain and Italy. As in Korea, thousands of daily diagnostic tests have also been performed in Germany. And they also have a hospital system with many more intensive care beds (triple that of Spain) which obviously allows better care for seriously ill patients.

On a small scale, in Italy, the wearing of masks and testing has made a difference in the Veneto region compared to Lombardy.

Challenges for the present and the future

We know enough about infectious diseases (caused by resistant bacteria or viruses) to anticipate and prepare for all possible scenarios. It just needs to be a priority for societies.

The pandemic has put us before the need to improve the response of the WHO and national administrations. And also before the importance of the measures that we can take individually.

We will need everything to fight the next pandemic when it arrives and, from now on, to fight climate change and injustice. In fact, both threats, pandemics and climate change, have points in common.