In recent times, the corona virus pandemic has become a major talking point often leading to heated debates on health systems and their resilience in the face of unprecedented assaults. Several publications have also been made on the subject.
These responses correspond to its impact across various sectors; health, economic, social, etc.
From November 2019 when the zoonotic transmission occurred in Wuhan region of China to date, there have been over 8m cases with over 400,000 deaths globally despite mitigants by different health governing bodies.
Similarly, the global demand for oil has dropped by 29m barrels per day from 100m with attendant economic consequences on oil exporting countries.
The World Health Organization has recommended face masks, regular handwashing and/or use of hand sanitizers, as well as social distancing as tools to contain the spread of the virus.
Also, countries, schools, businesses, places of worship and similar population cluster points all over the world have been on lock-down to “flatten the curve”.
Despite these measures, the number of people infected and/or dying from the disease has continued to rise.
Historically, the Spanish flu of 1918 which had a similar pattern to the current pandemic and left over 50 million deaths worldwide in its wake, was combated using similar methods i.e. the manipulation of social determinants of health including forcing people to wear masks, imposing quarantines, shutting down public places, avoiding handshakes, etc.
These sound all too familiar and needless to say, if a different approach is not used, the same fate awaits us in 2020.
A first step in developing a new approach would be to examine the 1918 Flu Pandemic with a view to identifying a critical weakness in the health systems which can be corrected by leveraging 21st century advances in science and technology.
It is not clear where the strain of influenza that led to the 1918–1919 Flu Pandemic originated.
The earliest cases were from Asia, America, and Europe (the moniker “Spanish flu” came about as Spain was reportedly hardest hit).
Thus, identifying patient zero or instituting contact tracing was out of the question.
This would have nipped the situation in the bud and contained the spread effectively. Interestingly, despite the current pandemic being traced to Wuhan in China, due to poor information sharing systems (among other constraints), details of this and the implications were determined late in the pandemic continuum.
The critical mass of population health parameters that would suggest an impending global health crisis was missed at the outbreak and epidemic stages.
Further, the number of deaths from the 20th century pandemic is speculatively between 50 million and 100 million; the wide variation was attributed to poor medical records keeping by “History.com” editors. This has become digital recently in some places.
Following the advent of the internet in the late 1960s and its commercialization in the early 90s, there has been an explosion of data sharing activities “online”.
This has disrupted industries and created “applications” that redefined the way we view and interact with our world.
Unfortunately, this transformation is not yet mainstream in healthcare.
In a recent study we conducted among over 300 healthcare workers and medical students in about 10 countries (developing and developed).
It was found that the healthcare industry lags behind others including education, finance, manufacturing, etc. in adopting technological optimization which correlated with poor Information and Communications Technology (ICT) training among healthcare workers and medical students.
Putting life first by being proactive against pandemics involves making digital optimization mainstream in healthcare.
It begins with organising periodic ICT training sessions for health professionals and students.
Further, integrating these digital systems can be weaponized in this fight through built-in surveillance and early warning systems that detect and generate alerts for a critical mass of health parameters in the population thus identifying outbreaks locally before they morph into epidemics or potentially, pandemics.
This article was originally published on Medium
Featured Image: uscpublicdiplomacy.org
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