Covid-19 pandemic could still be just a dry run for the ‘next big one’. Is the world ready?

Name: Six months after WHO declared Covid-19 a public health emergency, what more do we know now?
Uploaded: 2020-08-16T19:00:17.000Z
Duration: 7 min 54 s
Description: Six months after WHO declared Covid-19 a public health emergency, what more do we know now?

The economic ravages wrought by the virus could amount to tens of trillions of dollars. Half a year into the pandemic, one of the eight clear lessons the world needs to learn is: prevention is ultimately less expensive than cure

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The Covid-19 pandemic could be seen as a dry run for “the big one” when it eventually strikes. Photo: AFP

David Dodwell

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades.

Published: 3:00am, 17 Aug 2020Updated: 3:26am, 17 Aug 2020

Seven months ago, with the Covid-19 crisis still barely recognised outside China, I wrote sarcastically in this column about the six-year pandemic panic syndrome – suggesting that pandemic panic had erupted over the past two decades in a six-year cycle, that this outbreak of coronavirus (it had not been named then) was unlikely to be “the big one” like the Black Death of the 1300s; that we were terrible at recognising risk; and that the greatest threat from the Wuhan outbreak was likely to be economic rather than medical.

Now, seven months on, how wrong was I to be cynical? And what lessons have we learned that will help prepare us for the inevitable next pandemic?

Obviously I was wrong if I appeared to play down the threat. As I noted back in January: “The new can be dangerous and it is rash to be dismissive of the outbreak too early.” As we look today at 21 million cases worldwide and 769,000 deaths, with no sign of the pandemic abating, it is clearly inappropriate to make light of the threat.

But in a global health crisis, we still need to keep things in proportion. This is not “the big one”. The Black Death killed between 70 million and 200 million people between 1346 and 1353. As we weigh the risks that face us every year, it is important to remember that on average, 1.4 million people die from traffic accidents, 400,000 from malaria, 650,000 from influenza and 1.4 million from diarrhoea.

These are terrible mortality numbers, and so are those from the Covid-19 pandemic, but perhaps above all else we need to look at the traumatic past seven months as a dry run for the big one when it eventually strikes. Already there are at least eight clear lessons we need to take away.

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Six months after WHO declared Covid-19 a public health emergency, what more do we know now?

First and perhaps most important of all, international cooperation and a unified approach within each economy are essential to tackle a threat that knows no borders. It is almost embarrassing to see how dreadfully uncoordinated responses have been, and how poor the international cooperation.