How can we prevent the next pandemic?

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The 2020 pandemic brought plenty of suffering – both from COVID directly and from the measures that were implemented as a reaction to the virus.

If we want to avoid similar suffering in the future, we must prevent the next pandemic – so that we will not find ourselves with overwhelmed hospitals, rushed vaccines, and businesses closed ever again.

It begins with making virus research safer

The most likely origin for a pandemic like the 2020 one was and still is a lab leak.

The world is full of virus labs operating on dangerous viruses, and their track record is abysmal. 

“Between 2015 and 2019, US labs reported more than 100 accidents a year while experimenting with some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. […] More than 100 US labs with bioterror pathogens had faced federal sanctions for safety violations […], and regulators allowed them to keep conducting experiments while failing inspections, sometimes for years.”[1]

Regardless of whether the 2020 pandemic originated from a lab leak, lab leaks were and still are extremely likely. It’s only a matter of time before another lab leak has the potential to start another pandemic.

Hence, we must make virus labs safer. They shouldn’t be built within large metropolises like Wuhan. That makes containing leaks much harder and costlier. 

Virus lab personnel must be required to follow quarantine protocols that are at least as strict as the quarantine protocols the general population had to follow in 2020.

The 2020 pandemic showed how costly it might be to ignore virus lab safety. It’s time to take action and change that.

It continues with reacting to outbreaks fast

On the 5th of January 2020, the WHO publicly alerted the world of the Wuhan outbreak. The US waited 18 more days to ban flights from Wuhan. That was too long.  Blocking long-range travel is the most effective when done early.

Conversely, Taiwan began quarantining travelers from Wuhan as early as the 31st of December 2019 (!) and thus managed to have negative excess deaths in 2020 – despite its closeness to Wuhan. That’s the power of reacting to outbreaks fast.

If we want to avoid the suffering that would come with a new pandemic, we must improve our governments’ reaction times.

Why were governments so slow in their reaction to Wuhan’s outbreak?

Part of the reason is that most governments signed the binding International Health Regulations (IHR) of 2005, which contained a clause saying that unless the WHO recommends travel restrictions, other countries are supposed to refrain from imposing travel bans or trade restrictions on nations that are grappling with disease outbreaks (link and link).

These regulations weren’t written to protect the health of the human population but to protect trade. On the WHO’s website, the FAQs regarding IHR 2005 says, “One of the objectives of the IHR (2005) is to minimize unnecessary restrictions to travel and trade. […] The IHR ]sets the parameters for notification to WHO of all events which may constitute a public health emergency of international concern based on the following criteria [including] the risk that restrictions to travel or trade may result because of the event.” (Emphasis mine.)

Until the 2005 IH Regulations are in place, our countries are guaranteed to react too slowly to future outbreaks. We cannot allow this to happen.

It further continues with training

Populations that were trained about how to react to pandemics – such as Singaporeans and the Taiwanese, who were scarred during the SARS epidemics of the early 2000s – were faster to react to the outbreaks. For instance, many Singaporean families already had masks in their homes and already knew how to wear them properly and why they work.

Such preparation helps react faster to outbreaks. It is very effective: both Singapore and Taiwan recorded near-zero excess deaths in 2020.

It is time to train our populations, explaining what to do and why in case of future pandemics. (How to achieve this is explained in the “Dos and don’ts of institutional communication” article.)

It ends with preparation

Remember how, in early 2020, masks were scarce? You would be shocked to learn that France used to have a stockpile of 900 Million N95 masks (13 per citizen) and 1 billion surgical masks. That was in 2009, after the SARS outbreaks. Then, people forgot about the SARS outbreak, the stocks got used up or expired, and they haven’t been renewed. So, when COVID arrived, France was short on masks, too.

There are two lessons here. First, build stocks. Second, do not forget about the reason you built them.

Currently, the memory of the 2020 pandemic is still fresh. Designing plans to prevent another pandemic and preparing for it is relatively easy. The hard part will be to keep rehearsing the plan and renewing the stocks even when they will start to seem a waste of time and money because too much time passed since the last time there was a need for them.

The solution is to set up systems to remember. Let’s keep talking about the 2020 pandemic every year. Let’s remember the mistakes. Let’s proactively remember that we shouldn’t forget.

Bibliography

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