It is an interesting exercise reading the McInnes and Roemer-Mahler article today, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and I do not want to fault an article for not being able to prdict the future. Especially because I think the authors raise some very important points. Firstly, they indicate that the adoption of a rational/scientific approach to global public health might be as politically biased as a professedly political point of view. Secondly, they state that planning should not focus exclusively (or majorly) on the consequences of health problems, without taking into account their likelihood. It is true that many health problems that kill millions of people all over the world (such as tropical diseases, traffic accidents, issues related of obesity) are somewhat overlooked, because their consequences seem lees dire than those of a global pandemic.
Having said that, I think that their choice of case analysis was unfortunate. As the authors themselves say, despite its gruesome symptoms, Ebola has never been an ideal candidate for culprit in a global pandemic (unless it were to undergo radical mutations). It is much less transmissible than airborne diseases. Furthermore, the symptoms develop so fast (short incubation period), and kill the infected individual also so fast (on average) that there is not a lot of opportunity for the host to widely spread the disease.
The Covid-19 pandemic showed other flaws in their rationale. In a very interconnected world, the speed with which a highly transmissible disease spreads is much higher than many previous projections indicated. The difficulty of containing it is, therefore, also much higher.
Moreover, as our unfortunate recent experience indicates, the consequences of a global pandemic are not restricted to the millions of direct victims of the disease. The economic and logistical crash caused by the pandemic jeopardized the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, and will have severe health impacts in the coming years (caused by malnutrition, lack of access to medication), yet to be fully accounted for.
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One reply on “Week 13 – Murilo”
Murilo,
I agree with your assessment about the lack of comparability of Ebola, primarily for the reasons you identify. That said, because it is one of the most devastating diseases, and one with an extremely high mortality rate, it is greatly feared, especially in Africa. During one of the most recent Ebola outbreaks, there was concern that it could “jump” to the US or possibly to Europe. To the best of my knowledge, however, this never happened.
Despite the global experience with COVID-19, the world remains woefully underprepared for the NEXT pandemic. I know that there have been some steps taken in the WHO to modify their governance procedures to create a more agile organization that is able to be more effective in eliciting critical information in a more timely fashion when there is an apparent outbreak of a novel virus. So far, however, I don’t believe that even those reforms have been accepted in the WHO. –Professor Wallerstein