CHINA and other countries could have acted faster and more forcefully to control the initial outbreak of Covid-19 and the World Health Organization (WHO) should have declared the pandemic sooner.
These were the findings made by a panel of experts commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the failures to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) at the start of the outbreak.
“Public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January (2020)” shortly after the coronavirus began sickening clusters of people, the panel said. Containment measures should have been put in place immediately in any country with a likely case. “The reality is that only a minority of countries took full advantage of the information available to them to respond to the evidence of an emerging pandemic,” the panel said.
The panel also raised the question of whether it would have helped if the WHO used the word “pandemic” earlier than it did.
The panel’s study was commissioned by the WHO following criticism of its handling of the pandemic and allegations that it was colluding with China on a cover-up in the early stages of the health crisis.
While the study focused on “lost opportunities” for China and these major countries, there are lessons for smaller nations such as the Philippines on how to handle a pandemic.
The Philippines marks one year this week since its first Covid-19 case. It was on Jan. 30, 2020, when the Department of Health (DOH) announced the country’s first case of coronavirus infection. Patient No. 1 is a 38-year-old Chinese female tourist from Wuhan, China, where the new coronavirus strain called Sars-CoV-2 was first detected in December 2019, a SunStar Philippines timeline showed. On Feb. 1, 2020, the Philippines went down in history for listing the first Covid-19 mortality outside China. Patient No. 2 was the 44-year-old Chinese male companion of Patient No. 1.
When a Filipino with no history of foreign travel and his wife got infected and died, the DOH said it was confirmation of local transmission of Sars-CoV-2. This prompted President Rodrigo Duterte to declare a state of public health emergency on March 8, 2020, the timeline showed.
If we were to translate the panel’s findings to the Philippine timeline of Covid-19 infections, then maybe the government could have taken public health measures early on and without waiting for confirmation of community transmission.
The “lost opportunities” mentioned by the panel can also be said of the Philippines that could have imposed health protocols earlier before the mid-March lockdowns.
What the panel’s report stopped short of saying was that the failure of governments to act promptly was not for lack of knowing what to do but was deliberate on their part to not get on the bad side of China. Geopolitics aside, what the panel found out should be able to guide nations as they continue to face the challenges of this pandemic and prepare for the next.