It's clear that the world's early response to the outbreak of COVID-19 was badly flawed. A Canadian government agency whose job it had been to provide early warning of disease outbreaks had been largely disbanded the year before. Initial government response to the pandemic in both Canada and the United States was less than ideal. The declaration of the pandemic by the WHO was slow and communication was not clear, as this article from Nature points out.
At each declaration, the WHO advises governments on how to respond to the situation at hand. For example, last January, the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said of the COVID-19 outbreak, “It is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts and promote social-distancing measures.”
Liu admits that the term PHEIC isn’t as sexy as an emotive word, such as ‘pandemic’ or ‘emergency’. But researchers and health officials chose it partly because they wanted to avoid panic while encouraging world leaders to act according to WHO advice to contain a threat, says Gian Luca Burci, an international law specialist at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Burci helped to revise the regulations in 2005.
In hindsight, that reasoning appears to be flawed. Several reports note that politicians and the public mainly ignored the PHEIC declaration and Tedros's corresponding recommendations in January 2020, but started listening when the organization used the unofficial term ‘pandemic’ to describe COVID-19 in March, once it was spreading in multiple continents. Unlike the PHEIC, 'pandemic' is not a defined declaration, and countries haven't agreed to take any actions once it's used.
Let's hope that the world gets its act together before the next pandemic, because there WILL be another.
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