2020: The year of global health success

 Good morning to my esteemed readers and hope you are staying safe and following your local public health guidelines. Today, I reflect on the challenges and success of 2020 as seen from the global health perspective. You may be surprised to see my title of "global health success" in a year of pandemic, but, read on to see my perspective.

It is no doubt 2020 will go down as one of the global health challenging years in recent centuries. The most important occurrence of the year is the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 is a disease caused by one of the families of coronaviruses called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-coronavirus-2 or SARS-Cov-2 virus, which when infected, causes severe respiratory disorder (first reported in 2019), hence the name COVID-19.  The virus was first "discovered" in Ruhan Province of China allegedly from human-animal interaction in the city's animal market. Now, whereas coronaviruses are not new, there are mostly present in animals including bats. Their occurrence and diseases have been studied extensively in animals with the predictive assumption that it may be transmitted to humans in the future, especially as humans are interacting (pets, eating, hunting, etc.) with these animals.  Hence the outbreak of this virus in China and the subsequent pandemic proposition to the rest of the world is not new to public health disease surveillance experts. But, even with this knowledge of potential outbreaks of this magnitude, the world still remains unprepared to respond to emerging and novel severe acute diseases.

As evidenced by national, continental, and global responses, the world was not ready to respond to emerging diseases of pandemic proportions. Since the first report of the disease by China in late 2019, most countries, regions, and global bodies, including the World Health Organization (WHO), assumed a "wait-and-see" attitude to responding to the disease by China. The "blame-game" played by countries and regions to the so-called "China virus",  is sufficed to say that there was not initial solidarity to help China address the menace of the diseases. There is an old Africa adage that "when you see your neighbor's house burning, quickly wash yours" and another one is "Only a fool says this or that affects my brother/friend, but not me". In other words, instead of the world showing solidarity with China and working to contain the disease before it gets out of hand, we stood aside and watch China battling the diseases on their own. A HUGE mistake, that the world MUST learn lessons from and establish collective solidarity in global disease surveillance.

That notwithstanding, the global public health community rose to the occasion, and urgently worked to provide scientific evidence of how the world can respond to the pandemic. Global Health leadership institutions such as WHO, US CDC, NIH, EU, and Africa CDC formed alliances to coordinate national, continental, and global responses to the pandemic. Measures such as travel bans, social distancing, wearing face coverings, frequent handwashing, were put forth for the prevention and control of the pandemic. Others include repurposing of treatment regimens, such as hydroxy-chloroquine, dexamethasone, monoclonal antibodies, among others, to address acute infections and to control disease progressions and mortality. Within this "chaos" was the private-public partnership for research and development of vaccines to address the global pandemic. 

It is these interventions that led to global health success in a challenging year. The speed at which the virus was studied - detection, isolation, characterization, and synthesized - in record time is evidence of global health maturity and integration. As soon as the virus was identified and characterized, detection technologies, including PCR-technology, antibodies, antigen, and ELIZA were rolled-out for diagnostics and surveillance in order to generate scientific evidence of incidence, morbidity, and mortality to help inform control and preventive measures. At the same time, the characterization and synthesis of the viral RNA/DNA helped to identify potential vaccine developmental pathways to adequately respond to the pandemic. As of today, December 31, 2020, multiple vaccines were developed by private partners, including Pfizer, Modena, Astra-Zenica, and have been rollout at national, regional, and global levels. This is by no means an achievement that the global public health community must celebrate to showcase the strength, solidarity, and unity of scientific and technological advancement in global health. We should also be proud that we have demonstrated that scientific evidence must be at the forefront of innovation and that global health leaders are united in their resolve to develop, generate, and use scientifically rigorous principles to lead global responses to current and future pandemics. 

It is my hope that as we turn our attention to 2021, the current state of solidarity (e.g. Access to COVID-19 Tools and the COVAX initiative) would continue to provide critical access to prevention, control, surveillance, and vaccines equitably to all who needs them. 

Thank you for reading. Wishing you and your loved ones a Happy Global Health New Year!