Thammasat University students interested in the allied health sciences, the history of science, medicine, sociology, political science, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 31 March Zoom webinar on What did COVID-19 teach us about preparing for mega-crises?
The event, on Friday, 31 March 2023 at 4pm Bangkok time, is presented by Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the imoact of the Novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic internationally.
The event webpage explains: Before 2020, the UK was seen as well prepared for a crisis. In the first half of 2020, this belief was sorely tested. With “long emergencies” likely to be an increasing feature of our modern world, what can governments learn from COVID-19 to prepare for future crises, whether health-related or not?
Join us online to hear about a new report by Professor of Practice Ciaran Martin and colleagues examining aspects of how the first six months of COVID-19 played out in the UK and in four comparator countries: Italy, Germany, Australia and Singapore.
A central thesis of the report is that wide-reaching, long-lasting, complex and evolving crises are becoming more likely (thanks to climate change and other factors), and that these “long emergencies” require a different type of mindset and preparation than prevailed before COVID-19 in many countries’ crisis management systems. The report examines the UK’s crisis preparedness going into COVID-19, how this played out in the first six months of 2020, and – with reference to the four comparators – what can be done now in the UK and around the world to prepare for the next, undoubtedly different, crisis.
Speakers will include David Omand, author of upcoming book How To Survive A Crisis, was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the prime minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and homeland security.
Also speaking will be Ciaran Martin, Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations at the Blavatnik School.
Students are invited to register for the event at this link:
https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/events/what-did-covid-19-teach-us-about-preparing-mega-crises
With any questions or for further information, please write to
freya.pauluccicouldrick@bsg.ox.ac.uk
In January, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that although reported COVID-19 cases and deaths have declined significantly, it is not time yet for any country to lower its guard:
WHO says Covid remains a global emergency but pandemic could near its end in 2023
The World Health Organization on Monday said Covid-19 remains an global health emergency as the world enters the fourth year of the pandemic.
But WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was hopeful that the world will transition out of the emergency phase of the pandemic this year.
“We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible level, and health systems are able to manage Covid-19 in an integrated and sustainable way,” Tedros said in a statement.
The WHO’s emergency committee met on Friday and advised Tedros that the virus, which was initially discovered in Wuhan, China in late 2019, remains a public health emergency of international concern, the U.N. agency’s highest alert level. The WHO first declared an emergency in January 2020.
The WHO decision comes after the U.S. earlier this month extended its public health emergency until April.
In his statement Monday, Tedros said the world is in a far better place than it was a year ago when the omicron variant first swept the globe. The WHO has estimated that at least 90% of the world’s population has some level of immunity to Covid due to vaccination or infection.
Weekly Covid deaths have dropped 70% since the peak of the first massive omicron wave in February of last year, according to WHO data. But deaths started increasing again in December as China, the world’s most populous country, has faced its largest wave of infection yet.
Tedros on Friday said surveillance and genetic sequencing has declined dramatically, making it difficult to track Covid variants and detect new ones. Too few older people are fully vaccinated and many people do not have access to antivirals, he said.
“Do not underestimate this virus,” Tedros told reporters at press conference in Geneva on Friday. “It has and will continue to surprise us, and it will continue to kill unless we do more to get health tools to people that need them and to comprehensively tackle misinformation.”
Last month, the WHO chief said the end of the emergency phase of the pandemic is closer than ever before. In the fall, Tedros said the end of the pandemic was in sight.
“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic. We are not there yet but the end is in sight,” Tedros told reporters in Geneva last September.
In February, Thai PBS reported that according to Dr. Yong Poovorawan, head of the Centre of Excellence of Clinical Virology at the Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University:
COVID-19 in Thailand will subside this month, but will re-emerge from June until September, after which it will become a seasonal disease, like influenza.
After three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Yong said that we have learned ten things:
-The virus is evolving to survive, as it adjusts to reduce its severity and to co-exist with the human host. The mortality rate, which used to be 3-5%, has now reduced to 0.1%, similar to that of influenza.
-Severe diseases, such as Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have a slim chance of spreading globally. On the contrary, diseases which are less severe, such as influenza, can spread across the world.
-All vaccines are not much different from each other. mRNA vaccines provide a high level of immunity, but their efficacy only lasts for a short time because they were tested over a short period of time and, in the long run, the vaccines cannot protect against the virus. The death toll in countries where the population was given mRNA vaccines is not lower than that in countries which did not.
-COVID-19 infection has subsided because more than 70% of population of each country has been infected.
-Immunity caused by infection, in combination with vaccination, will last longer than immunity produced by vaccination alone.
-COVID-19 is becoming seasonal, like influenza and other respiratory diseases.
-Vaccines for the future are intended for vulnerable groups of people who tend to develop severe symptoms. People who are strong will not develop severe symptoms if infected again.
-If we could turn back time, we should make use of the body of knowledge as our guide in coping with the pandemic, instead of submitting to pressure from social media.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)