Game Changer: Architecture for Pandemic Preparedness
Despite considerable effort invested in global pandemic preparedness over the last two decades, the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need to be better prepared to identify and respond to new pandemic and epidemic threats. Several high-level panels and commissions have recommended improvements to the global public health architecture, while both the G7 and the G20 have pandemic preparedness high on their agendas. A major challenge at both the global and country levels is how to build stronger and smarter surveillance, especially for rapid detection of unknown pathogens, coupled with effective decision-making and response capabilities.
A fundamental reality is that stronger pandemic and epidemic intelligence requires that all countries are better prepared and able to collaborate with each other effectively. For this, structural aspects are important such as international legal frameworks, financing mechanisms, improved multi-sectoral collaboration, and the strengthening of existing global public health organizations, including the World Health Organization.
Outsmarting Pandemics: Collaborative Surveillance and the Role of Public Health Institutes
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how rapidly and to what dangerous extent diseases can spread today. The risk of an increasing incidence and scale of disease outbreaks with epidemic potential is growing, largely due to ongoing globalization, urbanization, deforestation and the intensifying interaction between humans and animals.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in disease surveillance in nearly all countries. Traditional surveillance approaches, such as monitoring the number of cases and deaths, even when optimized, are essential but insufficient for the management complex public health threats.
The complex challenge to outsmart pandemics requires profoundly robust healthcare systems globally as well as a collaborative, coordinated preparedness regarding multiple disease areas with pandemic potential, which is why joint forces are urgently needed to respond to and prevent a wide range of pandemic threats. A new model is needed for the surveillance for emerging threats, which builds upon traditional surveillance approaches but also incorporates epidemic intelligence, genomic surveillance, behavioral and social insights, surveillance at the animal human interface etc. This is what we mean by “collaborative surveillance”.
Central to notion of collaborative surveillance – and response - are the national institutions – often referred to as “National Public Health Institutes” (NPHIs) accountable for detecting public health threats, enabling public health decisions, defining and monitoring the response. While obstacles to collaboration remain in several settings, many NPHIs have innovated in the face of the pandemic’s challenges. We have an opportunity to learn from best practices and to foster greater global collaboration to keep our world safe.