Covid-19 caught the world off guard - pandemics must never surprise us again
by Daniel Clarke, Director, Centre for Disaster Protection
Photo: Russell Watkins / Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
Covid-19 caught the world off guard. Public health experts and commercial risk modellers knew that something like this was quite likely, and that the world was woefully underprepared. A long line of the great and the good, from Bill Gates to the World Health Organization, pleaded with the world to listen to the experts and invest in prevention and preparedness before it was too late, but the money didn’t come.
And so we find ourselves at the start of a covid-19 pandemic for which we were not adequately prepared. Many will lose their lives directly from the virus itself, and on top of this it is becoming clear that the economic downturn will also be brutal, leaving workers without jobs, and children without an education. Every country will be hit, but as with most crises it will hit the poorest hardest. Once the dust settles, the statistics we collect that enumerate death and suffering will show this to be the largest global crisis since the Second World War. But this won’t just look like a crisis—it will feel like a global crisis, burned into our collective consciousness as a shared trauma.
Despite this, there are reasons to be hopeful about the future, even as the crisis continues to unfold around us. Lives have already been lost and people are suffering, but our actions now can make a huge dent in the impact. And the lessons we are learning might help us better prepare for future events. The Centre for Disaster Protection is releasing The Future of Crisis Financing: A Call to Action that sets out how we might assess and financially prepare for such risks globally, with the tools and resources already at our disposal. Four lessons from the report stand out as even more true and urgent in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
1. Act early
The speed of responding to crises matters. Experience from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014/15 suggests that speeding up the response by one month could have averted more than half the cases in Sierra Leone, and substantially reduced the overall cost. If previous health outbreaks in low-income countries are anything to go by the indirect impact of the disease will be very substantial, and for such impacts, early response through existing systems such as social protection provides much more bang for your buck than later response. For example, an early response to food insecurity in Ethiopia would only cost a third of a full-fledged later response with the same impact. Countries with weak systems, such as fragile or conflict-affected countries, will need substantial support from international actors.
2. Money isn’t everything … unless you don’t have any
It’s difficult to stop the spread of covid-19 if communities can’t socially distance, or families can’t afford water or soap to be able to wash their hands. Calls to stay at home are unlikely to be heeded if this stops families from being able to meet their basic needs. And frontline healthcare workers could do more harm spreading the virus if they go to work without even basic protective equipment.
As a global epidemic with a global impact, leaving covid-19 to fester in any country would be a mistake. In addition to the obvious moral imperative to act, covid-19 would most likely return to other countries, causing repeat damage to lives and economies. As António Guterres correctly noted last week ‘we are only as strong as the weakest’. All countries need to stand in solidarity against the covid-19 crisis, with some countries needing more help than others.
3. Planning needs to include thinking about money
As with other crises, the global response to covid-19 will be funded by a patchwork of individual decisions by countries. Each decision will be subject to multiple calculations in addition to assessments of evidence. And for many countries, funding decisions will be made ad hoc, in real time, as more information reveals itself.
This approach can work for countries that are able to pay for whatever is needed, whenever required. However, in countries unable to deliver or finance their own response, there is a risk that the generosity of those contributing to the international crisis financing system will not match needs. If international partners make ad hoc funding decisions in real time, this can lead to late, inadequate, stop-start response, itself causing avoidable suffering and pushing people further into poverty and vulnerability.
4. If you want crisis risks to be well managed, make it someone’s job to make financial sense of the future
We have allowed covid-19 to surprise us once. We shouldn’t allow it, or other diseases, to surprise us again. That means we need to get much better at tracking global risks and stress testing financial preparedness.
The international system already has the equivalent of a Chief Medical Officer in the World Health Organization, and a Chief Emergency Manager in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The world also needs a Chief Risk Officer, tasked with monitoring and making financial sense of crisis risk, stress testing the financial preparedness of each country against these risks, and assessing how well prepared the international crisis financing system is to respond when national capacities reach their limits. Wherever possible, this Chief Risk Officer would also be required to publish their findings publicly, to allow scrutiny by researchers and civil society. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank play this role for the cost of international financial crises—but there is an incomprehensible gap in the system for other crisis, including health crises.
Over the course of the next year, the Centre will leverage its pooled knowledge and experience of crisis financing to support global efforts to respond to the current pandemic. And it will continue to push for reform of an international crisis financing system that is very clearly no longer fit for purpose.
The ideas in this article are based on the key findings from a report released by the Centre for Disaster Protection, The Future of Crisis Financing: A Call to Action, which built on a year of work with a high-level advisory group from development, humanitarian, and financial sectors to think through what we need globally to be able to prevent, prepare for, and respond to crises.
The Centre’s Glossary of Terms can be found here.