Dr Sanjay Gupta: One year of living in the shadow of a pandemic

Dr Sanjay Gupta: One year of living in the shadow of a pandemic

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In the first months of 2020, when the unprecedented health crisis quickly crossed borders – China, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan and soon, the United States – it began to take the form of a looming, global threat. Something outside of an epidemic.

While researching, I was surprised to learn that no definition of ‘pandemic’ was generally agreed upon. But an increasing number of medical experts and public health officials I spoke to told me that the rapidly evolving situation is in line with the bill.

Loosely speaking, a pandemic is an outbreak of a virus that can cause disease or death, where continuous transmission from person to person of the virus takes place, and evidence of its spread in different geographical locations. Check, check and check.

A few days later WHO adopted the same language.

To be honest, the WHO has been sounding the alarm for almost six weeks, since 30 January 2020, when the Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared the situation a public health emergency of international importance – the highest level health warning under international law. The definition is ” an extraordinary event that could pose a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of diseases and requires an international coordinated response. ‘

For this symbolic anniversary, I spoke to Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical leader for the coronavirus response, to reflect on the year of the pandemic and beyond.

Different countries, different reactions, different outcomes

Van Kerkhove – who said WHO is trying to do for the world what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do for the US – told me that the purpose of a public health emergency is of international importance before you leave a real pandemic, when there is still time to possibly prevent and in any case prepare for what is to come. Similarly, the WHO has been trying for more than a year to change the trajectory of the pandemic through, among other things, expertise, guidance, advice and support as well as regular news conferences.

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Although each country has responded in its own way to the emerging threat, it takes the early warnings more seriously, she said.

“It was not about rich or poor countries. It was about experience. It was about the countries that knew the threat of this; they heeded our warnings,” Van Kerkhove said. The experience is the result of dealing with previous infectious outbreaks, such as SARS, MERS and Ebola. And those countries quickly implemented strong public health measures, mobilizing community health workers, contact detectives, and laboratory technicians.

Van Kerkhove points to places like South Korea, Japan and Nigeria – all of which manage to keep the transmission of this new virus relatively under control.

For me, South Korea was one of the clearest examples of success. It reported its first case of Covid-19 on January 20, 2020, hours before the United States confirmed its first case on January 21.
But the two countries ended up in very different places: the US had more than 29 million reported cases and more than half a million deaths. South Korea? Less than 100,000 cases and less than 2,000 deaths. You can not downplay it as the US with a higher population than South Korea, because if you look at the deaths per capita per 100,000 inhabitants, the US has more than 161 compared to South Korea’s 3.
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Van Kerkhove said South Korea learned lessons from the MERS outbreak in 2015. “What they learned from it was to rebuild their system and improve their public health system, which was used during this pandemic,” she said. .

As an example, she pointed to what unfolded in the city of Daegu when there was a major outbreak in February related to church activities. “The case numbers were apparently out of control,” she said. “And Korea turned it around.”

How did they do it? Van Kerkhove said he was strategic and utilized the tools they had at their disposal. “They looked at the situation they were in. They improved their cluster research. They increased their screening ability, their testing ability. They used the quarantine effectively and they brought the outbreak under control. It seemed almost impossible – and they did. it turned around, ‘she said.

She added that other countries have also turned things around, for example Cambodia, Thailand, Rwanda and South Africa, even with the emergence of a more contagious variant there. “The resilience of people is encouraging and inspiring,” she said.

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What I have often noticed is that although the outbreaks of infectious diseases are crushing the poorer countries, this new coronavirus has affected many of the richest countries in the world excessively. Keep in mind that there are nearly 9,000 cases per 100,000 people in the United States. Compare that to India, where it is about a tenth of that, even though they have some of the most densely populated areas in the world.

As they say, money can not buy everything, especially not good health. “You can really have very good medical systems in countries … the best treatments in the world. But that does not compensate for the fundamentals of public health,” Van Kerkhove said.

Variants and vaccines

Now that we are in the second year of the pandemic, equestrianism has arrived in the form of vaccines. But with that, a more contagious and, possibly in some cases, a more deadly enemy. New variants of the virus are destroying cities in Brazil; different variants rage throughout the United Kingdom and South Africa. And they are also establishing themselves in this country.
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This can be addressed by providing better vaccine access to countries with understaffing. According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a global group for vaccines, rich countries now ingest one person every second, while the majority of the poorest countries do not yet have to administer a single dose.

But that is changing, thanks to COVAX, a global initiative that promotes equitable access for developing countries to Covid-19 vaccines. Led by the WHO and other organizations, COVAX delivered 20 million vaccine doses to 20 countries during the first week of distribution last week, according to WHO Director-General Tedros. An additional dose of 14.4 million vaccines will go out to another 31 countries this week.

“We are all part of this global community. Every life on this planet matters,” Van Kerkhove said. “Everyone on this planet deserves to be protected.”

Shoot for shot, the world begins to see hope. And the countries that have heeded the WHO warnings and followed the guidelines for public health give us a glimpse into a post-pandemic life.

“I have sparks of hope in many countries around the world,” Van Kerkhove said, pointing to places like Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan. “I see societies opening up. I see sporting events taking place. I see a resilient community leading their lives, which in some situations has pushed the transfer to zero.”

Van Kerkhove, I and many others have been humiliated by this virus – a virus that has taught us that rich and poor do not matter, borders do not matter and that unexpected things can and can happen. She and I both hope that all countries, but especially Western countries, use the unfortunate lessons we all had to learn to put the systems in place so that we are better able to face the next unexpected event, the next pandemic. , the next infectious pathogen – because this one will certainly not be the last.

Andrea Kane and Amanda Sealy of CNN Health contributed to this report.

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