The World after COVID-19: Reflections on Global Health and Policy

Abstract

COVID-19 has infected hundreds of millions of people across the globe. The pandemic has also inflicted serious damages on global and regional governing political structures to a degree meriting a revisit of their own raison d’etre. The global economic fallout is also unprecedented as the flows of goods and people got severely disrupted while lockdowns hit the transport, services and retail industries, among others. We argue that three realities need to be genuinely addressed for building a post COVID-19 order that has to be amply equipped to deal with the next global crisis, as well as the ones on-going for decades. First, there is need to shelf-away the hitherto practiced doctrine that global crises and problems are confronted through local responses. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic has cautioned us on the need to (re)invest in basic, many may consider naïve and simple, public health functions such as sanitation as well as transparent national and global health monitoring. Third, the pandemic is a clear reprimand to discard the mantra that privatization of healthcare delivery system is the solution in favor of viewing health as a public good that needs to be managed and executed by the state and its public sector, be it national, sub-regional or local. It is critical that we learn from such pandemic and advance our societies to become stronger.