On March 11 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. According to official data there have been more than 770 million cases of COVID, which have caused over 7 million deaths in 231 countries – almost 2.2 million of them in Europe. Other reports estimate that the number of deaths globally was much higher, perhaps even more than double.
We cannot rule out the possibility of a new pathogen causing another global health crisis. We do not know what will cause it or when it will happen, but no one doubts that there will be another pandemic. After all, human history is a history of pandemics.
Five years on from March 2020, many of us wonder whether we are better prepared for a new threat. The answer is clear: in some ways we are, but in others we are not.
What have we learned?
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented level of public-private collaboration. Never before had so much money and effort been jointly invested to develop vaccines. The speed with which mRNA immunisations were designed demonstrated that science and research work, and that if we put the right measures in place, they can be done in record time.
The speed of both bureaucratic procedures and medical trials should be an example for the future. If only the same could be done now to obtain a new vaccine against diseases like tuberculosis.
Read more: Europe had worst measles outbreak since 1997 – new data
The coordinated joint purchase and distribution of vaccines in Europe was also a success, one shudders to imagine how things would have been if vaccines had been managed in the same way as masks?
We have learned to work together. Most of the world’s research centres made their human and technological resources available to fight the pandemic, and there are currently more than 460,000 scientific articles on COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 in the PubMed database. This is four times more than on malaria, a disease we have been fighting for hundreds of years.
We know more about SARS-CoV-2 than about any other pathogen. Studies have also addressed many other aspects of the pandemic: economic, social, legal, political, ethical, and so on.
Moreover, advances in mRNA vaccine technology have brought about a revolution in biomedicine, not only for the development of new vaccines and formulations, but even for the treatment of cancer.
Read more: One of science’s greatest achievements: how the rapid development of COVID vaccines prepares us for future pandemics
One Health
The One Health approach to public health is about understanding the relationship between the health of humans, animals and the planet. While it is not new, the pandemic has given it new impetus and value. More than 75% of the new pathogens that affect us come from animals, and environmental, climate and ecological factors increase this flow of microorganisms.
If we want to protect ourselves from future threats, we need to monitor what is happening in the animal world, and how the environment influences it. This requires vigilance and cooperation between the health, veterinary and environmental sectors.
Two examples illustrate that we are partly learning the lesson: the control of the Mpox (formerly known as Monkeypox) epidemic in 2022, which affected 130 countries, and the ongoing surveillance of the H5N1 influenza virus in the animal world.
Read more: No, we’re not ‘one mutation away’ from an H5N1 bird flu pandemic – here are the facts
Where have we not improved?
In September 2020, the biologist Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias and I asked how we had reached the situation we were in. At that moment, some countries in Europe were leading both total case numbers and deaths in proportion to their populations, and we were already immersed in the second wave of the pandemic.
Even then, we were already highlighting some of the causes of the disaster. Unfortunately, five years later, we have still not improved in many respects.
The weakness of public health systems in some European countries remains of great concern. The pandemic highlighted the need for health personnel to strengthen primary care, reduce waiting lists, improve paediatric and geriatric services, and so on. We have made little progress in these areas.
Care homes for the elderly were especially hard hit. While they are not health centres, their healthcare services still need to be strengthened, as they house the most vulnerable (and increasingly numerous) segment of the population.
Research is vital
Research shortened the duration and intensity of the pandemic. Although there have been modest advances, a sincere and determined commitment to science is still lacking. We need to improve research degrees, reduce bureaucratic hurdles, and increase public-private funding.
European nations have recently committed to a huge increase in defence spending – military budgets of of 3%, or even 5%, of GDP are now on the table. However, a virus can be more lethal than even the most bloodthirsty dictator – this simple fact should spur leaders to push for a similar increase in spending on research and technology.
The pandemic itself became a political football, and fuelled much of tension that has fed rising levels of polarisation. The lack of leadership at the international level is overwhelming, and the global political situation is actually much worse than before the pandemic – the world is now plagued by wars, tariffs, faltering international cooperation and border walls that were much less present in 2020.
While reform of the World Health Organization – the only global institution on health issues – may be necessary, the solution cannot be for some countries to abandon it altogether.
The same can be said at the national level, as there are many obstacles to mounting a rapid and forceful response to any future health crisis. These include political tension, extremism, a lack of unity, consensus and leadership, and the impossibility of broad agreements or pacts with central governments. We saw this in in action during the aftermath of last October’s floods in Valencia.
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Pandemic denial: the ‘infodemic’
This political polarisation – where there are no greys, everything is black or white – has propelled an irrational wave of denialism. People align themselves with people who think like them, and refuse to critically evaluate the facts.
As researchers, we watch in amazement and astonishment as flat-earth theories come back into vogue and anti-vaccine movements grow in number. The pandemic of disinformation (the “infodemic“, as it has been dubbed) is not only alive and well, but seems to be on the rise. Improving the way science is informed and communicated to the public remains a priority.
Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic did not affect different social groups equally. The most disadvantaged people suffered the greatest health, social and economic consequences. Efforts are still urgently needed to reduce these health risk inequalities.
On balance, we can therefore say that we are no better prepared for a pandemic than we were five years ago. Health is no longer individual, it is global. Viruses know no borders, and it it only through more research and greater cooperation that we can be better prepared for the next threats.
Ignacio López-Goñi, Catedrático de Microbiología. Miembro de la Sociedad Española de Microbiología (SEM), Universidad de Navarra
This article is republished from The Conversation Africa under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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