The Pandemic's Wake-Up Call

While India’s problem-solving approach helped battle covid, it needs to boost its spending on health, including r&d, prioritise key disease threats, set up a public health cadre, strengthen care delivery at the primary level and use tech as a force multiplier

- Dr Soumya Swaminathan

Covid-19 has been without a doubt the worst health crisis I have seen in my lifetime. I can’t think of any other comparable event that has had this kind of debilitating impact on people, not just across one country but around the world. The first lesson of the pandemic was the lack of preparedness of health systems in countries across the world, including the most high-income ones. The gap was mainly in the area of public health— detection, surveillance, prevention and response to infectious disease threats. Systems need to be in place, including trained manpower, real-time data collection and analysis, quality-assured laboratories, a risk communication strategy and empowered health authorities who could advise the administration on action needed. Paradoxically, we have observed that some low- and middle-income countries, which relied less on hi-tech and more on existing primary health and community-based approaches (like Rwanda, Senegal, Thailand, and Vietnam) did relatively well.

In India, there have been many positive developments. From just one laboratory, the National Institute of Virology, that could do the RT-PCR test in the beginning, today, there are over 1,500 labs, both private and public, set up rapidly. This is also true of Personal Protective Equipment, which had to be imported initially but was soon being made indigenously. Also impressive was the innovation in diagnostic devices, analytical software, and the use of artificial intelligence for exercises like contact tracing and detection of cases. Plus, several Indian companies are manufacturing vaccines, not only by tying up with foreign groups but also by pursuing their own novel ideas. This has not happened before. All these show that there is a lot of potential and capacity, lessons that can be applied to other big public health problems.