We Need to Prepare for Pandemics. They’ll Keep Coming
The world spends far more on defense. Yet where is the real clear and present danger?
A French lab seeks an effective treatment against the coronavirus.
Photographer: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty
When it comes to infectious disease outbreaks, we just haven’t learned.
It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Last year, a report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, a body put together by the World Health Organization and the World Bank Group, said that there was “a very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen killing 50 to 80 million people and wiping out nearly 5% of the world’s economy.” A pandemic on such a scale would create havoc and insecurity; the world “is not prepared,” it said. Hopefully, the numbers never reach those levels, but what we’re witnessing is scary enough.
This is our world in 2020, after we’ve dealt with SARS, MERS, the avian flu and Ebola in close succession, and are now confronted with Covid-19. The Global Health Security Index4 report last year found that all countries, across income levels, weren’t ready to handle globally catastrophic biological events3. Few countries have tested their emergency operations in case of a biological threat and most haven’t allocated much funding from their national budgets to be prepared.