A Roadmap for the Pandemic Moving Forward

 

A team of 53 of the of the world’s best epidemiologists, pharmacologists, virologists, immunologists, and policy experts has released a report entitled "Getting to and Sustaining the Next Normal: A Roadmap for Living with COVID." The report is 129 pages comprising a comprehensive set of topics about how to get back to normal and prepare for next pandemic.

If we follow standard operating procedure, then our political system will forget all about the COVID-19 pandemic as soon as possible once the case rates go down to endemic/background levels. Then something as bad as or worse than COVID-19 will come along, we will find ourselves in a Don't Look Up situation, and we will endure another shitshow like the one we've just been through.

The report offers recommendations in twelve categories for avoiding this. Here is a quick summary of the bottom-line recommendations:

  1. Shift our public health focus from just COVID-19 to respiratory viral illnesses to include influenza and RSV.
  2. Build a infectious diseases dashboard to guide decision makers.
  3. Improve testing infrastructure and surge testing capability.
  4. Improve indoor air quality by upgrading ventilation.
  5. Improve vaccine and therapeutics capacity and test-to-treat.
  6. Improve global vaccine distribution systems.
  7. Expand research on long COVID.
  8. Address health inequities.
  9. Improve wages and benefits for the public health and healthcare workforce.
  10. Create a high-level political post for biosecurity and pandemic leadership.
  11. Create a comprehensive science-based communication and education approach.
  12. Find an alternative to closing schools in a pandemic.
I encourage you to read the report, or at least the Executive Summary. It will take political pressure from people like the readers of this blog to ensure that recommendations like this don't get ignored. 

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