EVEN at their most effective – and draconian – containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease Covid-19. With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick…
This article first appeared in The Observer on 15 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.
YESTERDAY, on 11 March, the director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, or Tedros as he is known, declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic – that is, according to the WHO’s definition, “the worldwide spread of a new disease”…
This article first appeared in the New Statesman on 12 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.
PLAGUES – or, to use a more modern term, epidemics of infectious disease – pluck at our most primal fears. We have lived with them for at least 10,000 years, ever since our ancestors took up farming and built the first semi-permanent settlements. And they have always had the upper hand. They know us intimately, preying on our strengths – our sociability, our love of gossip – and turning them into weaknesses. They are always a step ahead, and once they are out, like the genie, we can’t get them back in. All we can do is limit the damage. So here we are again…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 11 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.
IN 2018 global health expert Jonathan D Quick, of Duke University in North Carolina, published a book titled The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It. In it he prescribed measures by which the world could protect itself against devastating disease outbreaks of the likes of the 1918 flu, which killed millions and set humanity back decades. He is the former chair of the Global Health Council and a long-term collaborator of the World Health Organization (WHO)…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 1 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.
AS the world grapples with a global health emergency that is COVID-19, many are drawing parallels with a pandemic of another infectious disease – influenza – that took the world by storm just over 100 years ago. We should hope against hope that this one isn’t as bad, but the 1918 flu had momentous long-term consequences – not least for the way countries deliver healthcare. Could COVID-19 do the same…?
This article first appeared online in TIME on 7 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.