The World Health Organization ordered an independent review to find answers about the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as come up with ways to prevent another global crisis.
More than a year has passed since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. Despite this, though, it appears that the crisis continues to worsen as time passes by.
To date, the coronavirus has already taken more than 3.3 million lives across the globe. Although there are now some countries that are starting to return to their pre-pandemic life, a large number of regions and locations are still experiencing the worsening case of the global crisis.
As the battle against the deadly virus remains apparent, the World Health Organization set up an independent panel to review how the virus had killed millions of people. Based on the report, they found out that the pandemic was “preventable,” according to BBC.
The COVID-19 was a “preventable disaster”
The publication included several key details in the report titled, COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic. WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response compiled the review and published the material earlier this month.
As noted, the organization’s response was a “toxic cocktail,” alongside the global governments’. Co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia, also told reporters that the crisis we are in today “could have been prevented,” if it were not for the “myriad of failures, gaps, and delays in preparedness and response.”
The panel review continued that the World Health Organization’s Emergency Committee should have declared an international emergency a week earlier following the outbreak in China. Instead of waiting until January 30 to do so, the declaration should have happened during the first meeting on January 22, 2020.
February 2020 became a “lost month”
NPR released a similar report, covering the independent panel’s review. A part of the published material claims that the national governments also “wasted precious time.”
This led them to call February 2020 “a lost month,” considering that countries did not act effectively to contain the coronavirus. Europe and the U.S., for instance, “acted only when their hospitals began to fill up.”
The experts from the panel, later on, provided a few pointers on what led the pandemic into a crisis. They first deemed that the “global political leadership was absent,” adding that it has played a significant role in the crisis.
In addition to this factor, there are also the “combination of poor strategic choices” and “unwillingness” to mind inequalities. Moreover, the “uncoordinated system” is reportedly another variable that allowed the COVID-19 pandemic to become a “catastrophic human crisis.”
Images (1) & (2) courtesy of World Health Organization (WHO)/YouTube