Next pandemic: the cost of unpreparedness
The writer is an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Nebraska and has worked for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He can be reached at jasghar@gmail.com
The Covid19 pandemic is not over in practical terms. Still, thousands of people are dying due to it every month, though less than before. Apart from more than seven million deaths due to Covid19, the financial losses have also been monumental. According to the IMF report of 2022, the total cost could be $12.5 trillion by 2024. However, for many, these are massive underestimates of the real cost to the global economy. In another estimate published in The Los Angeles Times in 2023, the economic loss to the US economy due to Covid is above $14 trillion. Even a developing country like Pakistan spent more than $2 billion on just vaccine purchase, according to Arab Times. The cost the Pakistani government paid just for vaccines was more than two decades of allocated federal health budgets. According to the World Bank report in June 2020, India’s losses in one year were estimated to be $150 billion. The UK had the steepest decline in its GDP (9.8%), the worst in its 300-year history. The US economy shrank by 3.5%, the worst since 1946. Most countries did use significant portions of their GDPs to respond to Covid-19, like Italy and Japan, which invested more than 40% of their respective GDP.
But have you ever wondered how much we needed for a world better prepared for Covid or any other type of pandemic? How much did we need to prevent seven million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses across the globe? It was a paltry 50 cents, or 140 Pakistani rupees per person per year. If you add all this up for everyone living on this planet, it was still just $4.5 billion per year. But no country invested that amount. The US invested a total of $1 billion and Germany $600 million in preparedness in the last five years before the pandemic. Even the richest countries were not willing to invest in our collective defence system against an impeding pandemic. They were hoping that their individual health systems could protect them from the next pandemic. They knew that the next pandemic was imminent but wrongly believed that they could protect their population inside their borders, but they forgot the first lesson on infectious diseases: “Infectious diseases don’t respect national borders.”
The modern world experienced its first major pandemic in 1918. It infected one-third of the global population and killed around 50 to 100 million people. That had a significant impact on the world, whose population was just 1.5 billion a hundred years ago. Our population has increased manifold to more than seven billion and is fast encroaching upon animal sanctuaries, increasing the risk of future pandemics. In the last 100 years, we have had a couple of pandemics or near-misses, but less severe than Covid19.
Where it took nearly a century for a major pandemic to repeat itself, there is no guarantee that the next pandemic will take another 100 years to occur. There is also a possibility of multiple pandemics happening simultaneously. However, we have not learned any lessons from Covid19. We are still unprepared and unwilling to invest in future preparedness.
Pakistan has, however, shown leadership by arranging the first Global Health Security Summit in 2024. This was a contribution by Pakistan, as chair of the Global Health Security Agenda, to remind all governments to take preparedness seriously. Even a World Bank-supported Pandemic Fund has just received $2 billion, compared to the $10 billion needed per year. Just remember that the US paid $7 billion initially for just masks and protective gear. The GHS summit in Islamabad was attended by health ministries from many countries. Hopefully, this summit will be an annual event hosted by different governments in the future. It is also important to congratulate the Pakistan government for arranging this meeting at such short notice.
Pakistan, even with resource limitations, has started the process towards a better-prepared world. We are in this together, and there will be no such thing as “a” better prepared country. We need to have a better prepared world, and that is “Global Health Security”.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 17th, 2024.
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