Pandemic and the Economy – A Pandemic-Resilient Society

Journal of business continuity & emergency planning, 2020

The implications of a serious disease outbreak extend well beyond the disease itself. The levels of sickness and mortality, while important, can be quickly overshadowed by cascading risk implications that affect the global economy, threaten societal confidence, weaken the rule of law, present a risk to food security, and can lead to inter- and intra-state conflict. When multiple countries are concurrently impacted, the provision of life-saving and time-sensitive aid and humanitarian assistance can also be affected, leading to isolation and a domino effect of collapsing societies. When nations start from a low baseline level of resilience, then the speed of government and infrastructure failure may be swift. Resilience across every facet of government, community and business is critical if the disruptive effects of the disease and the more far-reaching effects of the fear the unseen enemy creates are to be controlled. This article describes the interconnected risks and impacts found ...

Theory and Struggle, 2021

It is now one year since the COVID virus started to infect humanity and eventually turn into a pandemic. There have now been nearly 200 million cases of COVID-19 infections, with over 2 million deaths. And there is permanent scarring to the world economy and people’s livelihoods. The world capitalist economy has suffered the largest contraction in output and income in over 100 years (since the ‘Spanish flu’ epidemic). The major economies (let alone the so-called emerging economies) will struggle to come out of this slump unless the law of the market and of value is replaced by public ownership, investment, and planning, utilising all the skills and resources of working people. This pandemic has shown that.

European Xtramile Centre of African Studies WP/20/074, 2020

The purpose of this study is to understand how countries have leveraged on their economic resilience to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus is on a global sample of 150 countries divided into four main regions, namely: Africa, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, America and Europe. The study develops a health vulnerability index (HVI) and leverages on an existing economic resilience index (ERI) to provide four main scenarios from which to understand the problem statement, namely: ‘low HVI-low ERI’, ‘high HVI-low ERI’, ‘high HVI-high ERI’ and ‘low HVI-high ERI’ quadrants. It is assumed that countries that have robustly fought the pandemic are those in the ‘low HVI-high ERI’ quadrant and to a less extent, countries in the ‘low HVI-low ERI’ quadrant. Most European countries, one African country (i.e. Rwanda), four Asian countries (Japan, China, South Korea and Thailand) and six American countries (USA, Canada, Uruguay, Panama, Argentina and Costa Rica) are apparent in the ideal quadrant.

2020

The pandemic creates much hardship but also shows us how quickly societies can adapt to necessary change, write the members of the University of Hohenheim’s department of innovation economics

Frontiers in Communication

Editorial on the Research Topic Coronavirus disease (COVID-): Socioeconomic systems in the post-pandemic world: Design thinking, strategic planning, management, and public policy Overview The declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, led to unprecedented events. All regions of the world participated in implementing preventive health measures such as physical distancing, travel restrictions, self-isolation, quarantines, and facility closures. The pandemic started global disruption of socioeconomic systems, covering the postponement or cancellation of public events, supply shortages, schools and universities' closure, evacuation of foreign citizens, a rise in unemployment and inflation, misinformation, the anti-vaccine movement, and incidents of discrimination toward people affected by or suspected of having coronavirus disease. Attempts have been made to protect the oldest age group at risk, but in many cases, this has led to over-restriction and age discrimination. The rationale for working on the Research Topic "Socio-economic systems in the post-pandemic world: Design thinking, strategic planning, management, and public policy" was the need to start reflecting on resilience and lessons learned from this public health event that revealed the global unpreparedness in critical areas. Also, the pandemic triggered Frontiers in Communication frontiersin.org

Journal of Social and Economic Development, 2021

The pandemic of COVID-19 disease has acted like a stress test on every aspect of life, but particularly exposed weaknesses of health systems design and capacity. There have been similar pandemics in the past, and the threat of more frequent future pandemics in the twenty-first century is real. It is therefore important to learn the right lessons with regard to health systems preparedness and resilience. The five design features that this paper discusses are related to the organization of primary care services, planned surge capacity in secondary and tertiary care, a robust disease surveillance system that is integrated with the health management information system, adequate domestic capacity in being able to innovate and scale up production and logistics of much needed medical products and a governance approach that recognizes the importance of the health systems being able to continuously learn and adapt to meet changing needs. In addition to this, the organizational capacity of the system to deliver required services would need more investment in financial resources, and a suitable health human resource policy.

Jurnal Administrasi Kesehatan Indonesia, 2021

Background: The world is in the grip of an unprecedented novel COVID-19 pandemic. These have resulted in massive impacts on humans as well as on economies invariably. Hence, planning for a future pandemic is vital in minimizing deleterious effects.Aims: The current review aimed to derive common policy perspectives that are important in future planning of a pandemic.Methods: A narrative review was conducted by searching published articles from PubMed, Medline, Scopus, CINAHL, and Google Scholar. Forty-eight articles were selected for the review.Results: The policy perspectives derived under mitigation were rearranged into surveillance, epidemiology, and lab activities. The policy perspectives under recovery derived were related to economy, supply chain management, sustainable and green concept, and health system.Conclusion: Understanding common policy perspectives is important in the mitigation and recovery planning of a pandemic with similar nature in the future. The spillover effec...

Progress in Disaster Science, 2020

There is no corner of the planet that has not been impacted by the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. While the COVID-19 pandemic has already had far-reaching socioeconomic consequences commonly associated with natural hazards (such as disruption to society, economic damage, and loss of lives), the response of governments around the world has been unparalleled and unlike anything seen before. Governments are faced with a myriad of multi-dimensional effects of the pandemic, including direct impacts on public health systems and population health and indirect socioeconomic effects including disruption to every single sector of the economy and mass unemployment. There is, additionally, the growing realisation that the timescale associated with this crisis may permanently change the very foundations of societies‘normal’ day-to-day life. As the world transitions to recovering from COVID-19, those developing that recovery need support in adjusting and improving their policies and measures. The situation seems dire, the stakes are high. Literature about the transition between the response and recovery phase in relation to pandemics is scarce. A further complication is that the pandemic will not allow countries to simply transition to the full-scale recovery, instead, a rebound from recovery to response phase is expected for a certain period until the immunization is in place. Pandemics indeed force us to think beyond typical emergency management structures; the cycles of the disaster risk management in the case of biological and other natural hazards are not exactly the same and no one-size-fits-all approach may be used. Still, some parallels may be drawn with the efforts to combat natural hazards and some lessons may be used from previous and the current pandemic. Based on these experiences and reflections, this paper provides a set of policy directions to be considered during the transition towards, as well as throughout, this transition phase. It is suggested that meeting this global, multi-dimensional, and complex challenge will require considerable international collaboration (even convention) and macro-scale changes to global and national policies. The recovery issues are mainly going to be dominated by politics, economics and social science. Necessary for an effective recovery, the pandemic response needs to be a holistic response, combined with an improved data ecosystem between the public health system and the community. We should also view this outbreak and our response to it as an opportunity to learn lessons and reaffirm our universal commitment to sustainable development and enhancing wellbeing around the world.

Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 2022

Nature Medicine

Health systems resilience is key to learning lessons from country responses to crises such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In this perspective, we review COVID-19 responses in 28 countries using a new health systems resilience framework. Through a combination of literature review, national government submissions and interviews with experts, we conducted a comparative analysis of national responses. We report on domains addressing governance and financing, health workforce, medical products and technologies, public health functions, health service delivery and community engagement to prevent and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. We then synthesize four salient elements that underlie highly effective national responses and offer recommendations toward strengthening health systems resilience globally.