COVID-19 and the Future of Health Care

The fifth event in the 2023 Ten Years Hence lecture series Is Globalism Dead on ThinkND featured Dr. Bernard Nahlen, Director, Eck Institute for Global Health, University of Notre Dame. In this talk, Nahlen discussed global pandemics and the future of health care.

Nahlen began by providing a brief history of pandemics, starting with Black Death (or the Bubonic Plague) of the fourteenth century that killed one-third of the European population. Infectious diseases were a new concept for world leaders attempting to combat lethal illnesses, which led to the development of a quarantine period to limit the transmission of diseases to new populations. The Influenza pandemic in the early twentieth century also had severe fatalities and used similar intervention methods that were employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, including mask-wearing and offering services outside. 

Nahlen also discussed the Cholera outbreak in the nineteenth century that affected much of the Global North. This pandemic triggered many conversations concerning international sanitation and health access to limit the spread of cholera, and eventually other life-threatening diseases. Organizations such as the International Red Cross, the United Nations and League of Nations Health Organization and the World Health Organization were eventually chartered due to these outbreaks. The emergence of global health governance mechanisms helped control the spread of deadly illnesses and provide intergovernmental health solutions. To combat COVID-19, some countries attempted to, both successfully and unsuccessfully, implement zero-COVID policies. Meanwhile, others focused on developing high-efficacy vaccines. Nahlen also discussed the zoonotic nature of most infectious diseases that can be spread from animals to humans through bites, eating meats, or drinking contaminated water. 

Nahlen also tackled the challenges and limitations of global health governance, beginning with climate change. Climate change also plays a role in the behaviors of certain species and ecosystems. Warmer temperatures can increase the range and life expectancy of bacterial diseases, and overall climate change can alter the placement of populations, air pollution and unsafe water sources. The nature of diseases means that humans must be concerned with the environmental impact on animals who might be carrying diseases or dangerous bacteria.

There are some concerns considering the likelihood of a future COVID-19-level pandemic. There are millions of undiscovered diseases in animals, many of which have the potential to affect humans. And because of the increased interaction between communities through travel, the transmission of these diseases could again become global. The world’s preparedness for the next pandemic depends on how individual countries institute health policies following the COVID-19 pandemic and how individual people might respond to another pandemic’s effect on their lives. Nahlen reported that, as determined by a model factoring in several scenarios of global preparedness, the probability of another COVID-19-level pandemic is 2.5-3.3% per year, which translates to a 88-92% likelihood in a 75-year period (reflecting the life expectancy of young people alive during the COVID-19 pandemic). There are also concerns about every country’s ability to track and control the spread of diseases, share information with other communities and act in harmony with other affected parties. 

To prepare for the next pandemic, Nahlen identified the World Health Organization as a powerful body to bring countries together to discuss opportunities for teamwork when preventing disease outbreak. While the WHO’s power is more limited than many would hope, it has been instrumental in limiting other outbreaks and public health risks such as smoking. The WHO has also taken steps to enforce regulations and create a pandemic treaty focused on preventing catastrophic failure of health systems and establishing universal health care. Nahlen concluded by emphasizing how detrimental pandemics are socially, physically and financially, which makes preventing them so important. Investing in pandemic prevention includes the development of better scientific and medical tools, the establishment of a global epidemic response and mobilization team and an increased focus on the survival of third-world countries.

Visit the event page for more.