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What are, and have been, the key challenges in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic? The first challenge is to understand the behaviour of an emerging disease caused by a new variant of a virus. Viral pandemics can have impacts that are as significant in the socio-economic field as they are in epidemiology and viral medicine.
Image: US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases In terms of its scope, Covid-19 is like no other disaster that has occurred in the last 100 years, since, in fact, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed more people than both world wars combined, and contributed to the end of the First World War.
Pandemics are included because many of the effects of a pandemic are likely to be socio-economic in nature. There is also a link between pandemics and the 'intentional disaster' of bioterrorism (Trufanov et al. Classification and prioritization of essential systems in hospitals under extreme events. Caffrey 2005.
As the Covid-19 pandemic progresses, causing distributed crises in one country after another, it is like watching all I have taught about for the last four decades flash past in a sort of speeded-up film. My primary message was that a pandemic is as much a socio-economic and behavioural problem as a medical and epidemiological one.
It is now more than ten years since there was a general push to induce countries to plan for pandemics (WHO 2005). About the same time, 2007, Dr Michael Leavitt of the US Department of Health and Human Services wrote: "We don't know when a pandemic will arrive. Major epidemics and pandemics (what is the difference?)
Myth 20: Field hospitals are particularly useful for treating people injured by sudden impact disasters. Reality: Field hospitals are usually set up too late to treat the injured and end up providing general medicine and continuity of care. Myth 35: We are well organised to face a pandemic or CBRN attack.
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