Wanted: world leaders to answer the coronavirus pandemic alarm
- The outbreak is everybody’s problem but so far countries are not working together to take on an ever more challenging crisis
- The international community has sleepwalked into an emergency that it could have prepared for years ago, analysts say
Olga Jonas worked as an economic adviser at the World Bank when hundreds of staff focused on the global threats from climate change. During the same period, as few as two people were looking at risks from disease pandemics. Jonas was one of them.
She spent seven years at the bank coordinating the organisation’s response to global avian and pandemic flu threats between 2006 and 2013, and it was an uphill fight to get attention, according to a report she wrote for the International Monetary Fund in 2014.
“Although a recent World Bank report identified pandemics as one of the three major global risks – together with climate change and financial crises – most official discussions, reports and communications take no notice of pandemic risk,” she wrote at the time about global policymaking.
Not much had changed in the interim to prepare nations for a disease like Covid-19, now sweeping the planet, she said.
“Very little was done to help countries improve their preparedness, and that’s absolutely necessary and was in every report after every pandemic, but nobody was accountable,” said Jonas, who is now a senior fellow with the Harvard Global Public Health Institute in the United States after a 33-year career at the World Bank. “So costs are now so much higher than would have been necessary.”
