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be prepared! This is the motto of the Scouts. But what to prepare?exist lion kingThe song “Be Preparation” is a stirring celebration of cannibalism, while Tom Lehrer’s eponymous song advises the Boy Scouts: “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s no good / Unless you get her price a large part of it.”
Clearly, preparation is not enough; one must be ready to do the right thing. The UK’s Covid-19 inquiry recently began holding hearings on the country’s “resilience and preparedness”. it’s time.
In an ill-prepared world, Britain is generally seen as less prepared than most, perhaps because of the pressure of austerity policies and disruptions in the Brexit process.
“Clearly, we may have simply not been fully prepared,” Hugo Keith, the lead attorney for the investigation, said on the first day of proceedings. “Swift action can save lives.” From the perspective of these families, Britain does not have these three things. ’ I sympathize with these views, but here’s the question: who wasn’t an afterthought, but was fully prepared before the outbreak?
In 2019, the highly regarded Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security convened an international team of experts to compile the Global Health Security Index (GHS).this GHS Index Relying on more than 100 measures, ranging from “Does the country have a national emergency response plan for a pandemic?” and “Can the country’s laboratory system perform five or more WHO core tests?” to “Does the country have adequate road network?”.
According to the GHS index, the most prepared country in the world is the United States, while the least prepared country is Equatorial Guinea. But the U.S. death rate from COVID-19 is much higher than that of Equatorial Guinea. So what does America gain by being prepared?
Admittedly, this sole comparison can be misleading. Older adults are at a much greater risk of dying from COVID-19, and there are more elderly people in the United States. Many COVID-19-related deaths in Equatorial Guinea may have gone unrecognized or undercounted.
Yet in a disturbing study published late last year, economists Robert Tucker Omberg and Alex Tabarrok addressed the question Digging deeper, it found “hardly any form of pandemic preparedness helped mitigate or shorten the pandemic”. This is true whether considering medical readiness indicators or softer cultural factors such as individualism or trust levels. Of course, some countries have responded far more effectively than others, but the indicators published in 2019 cannot predict which countries will rise to the challenge.
One response to this counter-intuitive finding is that the GHS Index does a poor job of measuring readiness. However, it seemed plausible at the time, and it still seems plausible now. Another response is that pandemic preparation can be very effective against different pathogens. The Sars-Cov-2 virus, which can spread widely even among asymptomatic people, is deadly enough to kill millions but mild enough to often cause people to unknowingly infect others. The next time it may be bird flu, a well-prepared public health system may be more decisive.
But maybe we need to take the Omberg/Tabarrok study seriously: maybe traditional preparations really aren’t helping much. what’s next
One conclusion is that we should prepare, but in a different way. Some things that weren’t obvious in 2019 are obvious now, even to many experts. For example, Joshua Gans, Economist, ” Epidemic Information Solutions (2021) argue that we have learned that epidemics can be viewed as information and incentive problems. If you can collect enough tests that are reasonably accurate, incentivize people to take them and take appropriate action based on the results, you can isolate many cases and prevent the spread of the disease without locking everything down. Preparing a flexible system for testing and compensating people in self-isolation will not be in many 2019 pandemic plans. I will now.
Another form of preparedness that could pay off is wastewater surveillance, which can cost-effectively spot the resurgence of old pathogens and the emergence of new ones, and possibly provide enough warning to stop some future epidemics before they start. “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine,” Tabarok said. The faster we get our vaccine manufacturing, testing and production systems in place, the better our chances; these can all be prepared.
But we also need to be able to step back and see the big picture. There is one indicator of preparedness that is associated with lower death tolls, and it is the broadest indicator – “national capacity”, or a country’s ability to complete its mission.
Political scientists Jonathan K Hanson and Rachel Sigman measure state capacity by combining indicators such as the ability to raise complex taxes and the availability of good statistics. (Predictably, Denmark topped the list, Somalia was last, and the UK and US underperformed Germany and South Korea but outperformed France and Italy.)
It’s almost a tautology that states should work on improving their capabilities, but even the tautology is worth remembering. The survey is assessing the UK’s preparedness for the last pandemic, but the next one could be very different and the next crisis may not be a pandemic at all.
From this perspective, “ready” simply means “ready”. It’s not exactly for the Boy Scouts, but it’s not a bad mission statement for the UK government.
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