Counter Crisis: Are we ready for the next pandemic?

Author: Centre for Disaster Protection

Photo: John Wessels via Getty Images

While the world will want to forget all about COVID-19 and the destruction it left behind, we must learn lessons to be better prepared and save more lives and livelihoods in the next crisis. Finance is crucial for containing the spread of the new disease while not leaving countries to raid their national budgets and accumulate unsustainable debt burdens. But we don't need just more money; we need systems that ensure money is timely and reaches the frontline.

In Episode 3 of the Centre for Disaster Protection's podcast, Counter Crisis, Cristina Stefan, the Centre’s Lead Risk Finance Advisor, is joined by Ruchir Agarwal, a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, to discuss why the race against the next pandemic has already started.

The conversation, hosted by Jeevan Vasagar, Editor of Our Planet at Tortoise Media, starts on an optimistic note as Ruchir underscores the progress made in our collective approach towards addressing global crises. During the pandemic, the world turned to the World Health Organization, but it became evident that no single entity had the mandate to respond to a crisis like COVID-19.

“How we’ve understood the world we live in is completely different, before and after the pandemic. Where I think the world has a better understanding, is that a collective response is needed for problems like the pandemic is one, there is a much richer understanding that pandemics are a global security issue, an economic issue, and not just a public health issue.”

Ruchir Agarwal

Cristina outlined three elements we can take from the COVID-19 experience to be financially better prepared for the next pandemic. Firstly, there needs to be a dedicated fund, such as the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund, to provide substantial resources for countries to bolster their preparedness efforts. Secondly, allocated funds should not just be available in theory but integrated into existing systems. And finally, there must be comprehensive needs assessments across all levels of the system – spanning from national and regional to global levels – to better understand and address the requirements for preparedness.

All three are essential for speeding up financing—a matter of life and death in a pandemic. “If we have prearranged financing available on Day Zero of the next pandemic on behalf of especially the developing world, that allows us to ensure that we can buy life-saving tools for basically a larger fraction of the global population immediately,” Ruchir explains.

Cristina then sheds light on the Pandemic Emergence Facility, aimed at bringing timely finance to countries at an unprecedented scale, underscoring the immense pressure for both speed and scale in pandemic response. “This is the whole balancing act that we have to do in the case of pandemics much more and much more thoughtfully than we would do for any other disaster. One day or one week can change the course of the outbreak,” she explains. The closure of the Pandemic Emergency Facility has left a void in the system. Despite the introduction of the new pandemic fund, the world’s preparedness still relies on various smaller-scale and parallel financing mechanisms, many of which were not initially designed for pandemics. Day Zero financing, or pre-arranged financial support, remains largely absent.

But making this right is possible. Ruchir points out that the pandemic fund began with just $1.3 billion in seed funding, emphasising that it’s not just about vast sums of money upfront but about securing commitments from donor countries. Cristina suggests that insurance can be effective up to a certain severity level, stressing the importance of involving countries in decision-making. However, there will always be unforeseen shocks that evade predictive models, highlighting the inherent limitations of human imagination. How do we put a price on events like ‘disease X’, where even experts struggle due to the unpredictability of such phenomena? The pandemic’s unpredicted severity revealed the shortcomings of existing models, emphasising the role of imagination in creating insurance contracts.

Jeevan raises the issue of people’s resistance to more worst-case scenarios and, thus, the urgency of action. Ruchir responds by highlighting that this isn’t solely a matter of development or humanitarianism; it’s about self-interest.

Click here to listen to the episode in full.

If you missed our earlier episodes, you can also find our Episode One and Episode Two.

To discuss any of the aspects raised in this article, or for further information about the work of the Centre, please get in touch.