{
  "title": "Toward better pandemic preparedness",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar",
  "canonical": "https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar",
  "overlayPath": "/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar/index.md",
  "summary": "Infectious disease outbreaks are inevitable—but we can mitigate their effects by investing in prevention and preparedness",
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "Key observations: pandemic performance versus preparedness metrics",
      "content": "- The Global Health Security Index in 2019 ranked the United States as best prepared and the United Kingdom as next best prepared; two years later the United States had endured the highest global death toll from COVID-19, with more than 700,000 deaths.\n- The United Kingdom recorded seven times more deaths than the 20,000 that its government chief scientific adviser suggested in March 2020 would be a “good outcome.”\n- Based on a 2018 WHO self-assessment of IHR implementation, 86 percent of countries in Europe were deemed at the highest levels of pandemic preparedness on paper.\n- In practice, Europe experienced the second highest death rate from COVID-19 of any region, at 1,294 per million people.\n- Conversely, WHO judged just 15 percent of countries in Africa to be adequately prepared, yet fewer than 205 deaths per million have been reported in Africa.\n- Predictive metrics failed to capture the value of prior outbreak experience, cross-country collaboration, and community-based response capacities (examples: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal)."
    },
    {
      "heading": "What went wrong in seemingly resilient systems",
      "content": "- Effective health care requires four elements: “staff, stuff, space, and systems.”\n- Example of mismatch: the UK built seven Nightingale Hospitals at a cost of $736 million that largely went unused because trained staff were insufficient.\n- Large health systems were overstretched: examples cited include Italy’s Servizio Sanitario Nazionale and Brazil’s Sistema Único de Saúde.\n- Routine essential health care provision remains fragile in these countries."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Successful country practices and capacity building",
      "content": "- Community-based, bottom-up approaches helped many countries avoid harsher measures in 2020:\n  - Thailand: four decades of volunteer recruitment mobilized for logistics and remote area coverage.\n  - Vietnam: use of existing local governance for community-based coordination of quarantines and self-isolation.\n  - Japan: rapid training of public health nurses enabled thorough retrospective and prospective contact tracing to identify main clusters within weeks.\n  - Senegal: Institut Pasteur de Dakar was one of only two laboratories in Africa able to test for SARS-CoV-2 in February 2020; free tests yielded results within 24 hours or less; by April 2020, 43 African countries had the capacity to effectively diagnose COVID-19.\n- Adaptations from Ebola responses (2014–16) in West Africa improved community-based care and quarantine measures."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Economic case for prevention and preparedness",
      "content": "- Estimates cited: by 2025, COVID-19 will have a global economic burden of $16–$35 trillion (McKinsey & Company and an independent G20 panel).\n- Even modest reductions in this cost from better preparedness would yield substantial absolute returns on investment.\n- Investing in health delivers two types of dividends:\n  - Immediate: better responses to acute public health emergencies, including antimicrobial resistance.\n  - Long-term: healthier and more equitable societies, which improve everyday health care and fiscal protection and speed economic recovery (example: Finland)."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Science, vaccine equity, and manufacturing",
      "content": "- Rapid development of multiple safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines reflects decades of investment in scientific research.\n- Governments must continue support for science and technology, including during uncertain periods, to accelerate future responses.\n- The COVAX Facility has underdelivered: lacking financial power to lower prices, forced to the back of the queue and reliant on donations.\n- Example of hoarding: Canada ordered doses equal to 10 times its population.\n- Recommendation: build and scale up vaccine manufacturing hubs in low-income regions to end the acute phase sooner and provide infrastructure for other infectious diseases."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Global governance, IHR, and WHO",
      "content": "- The International Health Regulations (IHR) legally bind 196 countries to develop capacities to rapidly report and respond to disease outbreaks.\n- During the pandemic many countries complied only in part, due to incomplete awareness or deliberate flouting of the regulations.\n- A revamped IHR should:\n  - Adopt a more nuanced alerting mechanism.\n  - Empower WHO to continually review and improve member states’ compliance.\n- WHO needs adequate financial support, authority, and trust to ensure better compliance.\n- Specific funding suggestion: an increase in funding of $1 billion a year in assessed contributions for the WHO would be a start."
    },
    {
      "heading": "Conclusions and imperative",
      "content": "- Successes and failures in the COVID-19 pandemic clarify actions needed to be better prepared for the next pandemic.\n- Investing in prevention and preparedness, strengthening local public health capacity, supporting science, building regional manufacturing, and reinforcing global health governance are central priorities.\n- Quotation framing the article’s message: Benjamin Franklin—“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”\n\nSource: Toward better pandemic preparedness, JAY PATEL and DEVI SRIDHAR, December 2021.\n\n---\n\n Content in this bundle\n\n- نحو المزيد من التأهب لمواجهة الجوائح\n  - نحو المزيد من التأهب لمواجهة الجوائح (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - نحو المزيد من التأهب لمواجهة الجوائح (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- Hacia una mejor preparación para pandemias ● Finanzas y Desarrollo ● Diciembre de 2021\n  - Hacia una mejor preparación para pandemias ● Finanzas y Desarrollo ● Diciembre de 2021 (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - Hacia una mejor preparación para pandemias ● Finanzas y Desarrollo ● Diciembre de 2021 (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- Vers une meilleure préparation aux pandémies\n  - Vers une meilleure préparation aux pandémies (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - Vers une meilleure préparation aux pandémies (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- Toward Better Pandemic Preparedness\n  - Toward Better Pandemic Preparedness (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - Toward Better Pandemic Preparedness (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n- 完善疫情防范措施 ●《金融与发展》● 2021年12月号\n  - 完善疫情防范措施 ●《金融与发展》● 2021年12月号 (Markdown version){rel=\"alternate\" type=\"text/markdown\"}\n  - 完善疫情防范措施 ●《金融与发展》● 2021年12月号 (PDF){rel=\"external\" type=\"application/pdf\"}\n\n---\n\nSource: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar"
    }
  ],
  "bullets": [
    "[Markdown version](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar/index.md)",
    "[Structured JSON version](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar/index.json)",
    "[Bundle manifest](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar/bundle-manifest.json)",
    "Authors: JAY PATEL, DEVI SRIDHAR",
    "Published: December 2, 2021",
    "The Global Health Security Index in 2019 ranked the United States as best prepared and the United Kingdom as next best prepared; two years later the United States had endured the highest global death toll from COVID-19, with more than 700,000 deaths.",
    "The United Kingdom recorded seven times more deaths than the 20,000 that its government chief scientific adviser suggested in March 2020 would be a “good outcome.”",
    "Based on a 2018 WHO self-assessment of IHR implementation, 86 percent of countries in Europe were deemed at the highest levels of pandemic preparedness on paper.",
    "In practice, Europe experienced the second highest death rate from COVID-19 of any region, at 1,294 per million people.",
    "Conversely, WHO judged just 15 percent of countries in Africa to be adequately prepared, yet fewer than 205 deaths per million have been reported in Africa.",
    "Predictive metrics failed to capture the value of prior outbreak experience, cross-country collaboration, and community-based response capacities (examples: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal).",
    "Effective health care requires four elements: “staff, stuff, space, and systems.”",
    "Example of mismatch: the UK built seven Nightingale Hospitals at a cost of $736 million that largely went unused because trained staff were insufficient.",
    "Large health systems were overstretched: examples cited include Italy’s Servizio Sanitario Nazionale and Brazil’s Sistema Único de Saúde.",
    "Routine essential health care provision remains fragile in these countries.",
    "Community-based, bottom-up approaches helped many countries avoid harsher measures in 2020:",
    "Adaptations from Ebola responses (2014–16) in West Africa improved community-based care and quarantine measures.",
    "Estimates cited: by 2025, COVID-19 will have a global economic burden of $16–$35 trillion (McKinsey & Company and an independent G20 panel).",
    "Even modest reductions in this cost from better preparedness would yield substantial absolute returns on investment.",
    "Investing in health delivers two types of dividends:",
    "Rapid development of multiple safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines reflects decades of investment in scientific research.",
    "Governments must continue support for science and technology, including during uncertain periods, to accelerate future responses.",
    "The COVAX Facility has underdelivered: lacking financial power to lower prices, forced to the back of the queue and reliant on donations.",
    "Example of hoarding: Canada ordered doses equal to 10 times its population.",
    "Recommendation: build and scale up vaccine manufacturing hubs in low-income regions to end the acute phase sooner and provide infrastructure for other infectious diseases.",
    "The International Health Regulations (IHR) legally bind 196 countries to develop capacities to rapidly report and respond to disease outbreaks.",
    "During the pandemic many countries complied only in part, due to incomplete awareness or deliberate flouting of the regulations.",
    "A revamped IHR should:",
    "WHO needs adequate financial support, authority, and trust to ensure better compliance.",
    "Specific funding suggestion: an increase in funding of $1 billion a year in assessed contributions for the WHO would be a start.",
    "Successes and failures in the COVID-19 pandemic clarify actions needed to be better prepared for the next pandemic.",
    "Investing in prevention and preparedness, strengthening local public health capacity, supporting science, building regional manufacturing, and reinforcing global health governance are central priorities.",
    "Quotation framing the article’s message: Benjamin Franklin—“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”",
    "**نحو المزيد من التأهب لمواجهة الجوائح**",
    "**Hacia una mejor preparación para pandemias ● Finanzas y Desarrollo ● Diciembre de 2021**",
    "**Vers une meilleure préparation aux pandémies**",
    "**Toward Better Pandemic Preparedness**",
    "**完善疫情防范措施 ●《金融与发展》● 2021年12月号**"
  ],
  "related": [
    {
      "title": "نحو المزيد من التأهب لمواجهة الجوائح",
      "role": "document",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/ar/patel.pdf",
      "summary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/ar/patel.pdf.md",
        "mime": "text/markdown"
      },
      "binary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/ar/patel.pdf",
        "mime": "application/pdf"
      }
    },
    {
      "title": "Hacia una mejor preparación para pandemias ● Finanzas y Desarrollo ● Diciembre de 2021",
      "role": "document",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/es/patel.pdf",
      "summary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/es/patel.pdf.md",
        "mime": "text/markdown"
      },
      "binary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/es/patel.pdf",
        "mime": "application/pdf"
      }
    },
    {
      "title": "Vers une meilleure préparation aux pandémies",
      "role": "document",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/fr/patel.pdf",
      "summary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/fr/patel.pdf.md",
        "mime": "text/markdown"
      },
      "binary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/fr/patel.pdf",
        "mime": "application/pdf"
      }
    },
    {
      "title": "Toward Better Pandemic Preparedness",
      "role": "document",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/patel.pdf",
      "summary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/patel.pdf.md",
        "mime": "text/markdown"
      },
      "binary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/patel.pdf",
        "mime": "application/pdf"
      }
    },
    {
      "title": "完善疫情防范措施 ●《金融与发展》● 2021年12月号",
      "role": "document",
      "sourceUrl": "https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/zh/patel.pdf",
      "summary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/zh/patel.pdf.md",
        "mime": "text/markdown"
      },
      "binary": {
        "path": "/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/december/zh/patel.pdf",
        "mime": "application/pdf"
      }
    }
  ],
  "alternates": {
    "markdown": "/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar/index.md",
    "json": "/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar/index.json",
    "bundleManifest": "/en/publications/fandd/issues/2021/12/pandemic-preparedness-patel-sridhar/bundle-manifest.json"
  },
  "generatedAtUtc": "2026-09-15T17:26:05.427Z"
}