Pandemics“The Lesson Is to Never Forget”
Olga Jonas, senior fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute, is an expert in managing the risks of pandemics. “A lesson [from previous pandemics] we should remember is that governments have the responsibility to prepare for a pandemic; they have the obligation to invest in public-health systems to protect their citizens from both the threat and the reality of the next pandemic,” she says. “The U.S. government didn’t react either quickly or adequately back in January, when the first confirmed case of coronavirus was found.”
Olga Jonas, senior fellow at the Harvard Global Health Institute, is an expert in managing the risks of pandemics. During her 33-year stint as an economist at the World Bank, one of her responsibilities was to coordinate the bank’s contribution to the global efforts in 2006‒12 to reduce the avian and pandemic influenza threats. In 2013, Jonas authored “Pandemic Risk” for the annual flagship publication, the World Development Report.
As The Harvard Gazette’s Liz Mineo spoke with Jonas about what governments can learn from the coronavirus outbreak to be prepared for the next pandemic, the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, was showing that the virus has infected more than 2 million people and killed more than 150,000 worldwide.
Liz Mineo: What are the differences between the 1918 flu pandemic and the 2019 coronavirus pandemic? What are the similarities?
Olga Jonas: Fortunately, such pandemics don’t happen very often, but the speed of the virus spread is a most concerning feature. One clear difference is that the world is now much more densely populated than in 1918. There were fewer than 2 billion people in 1918, and now there are 7.5 billion, and the population is much more mobile. In 1918, there was no air travel. People move around much more, and the spread of a virus is much faster than before, when people traveled by ship or horse, or didn’t travel much at all. Another difference is that in 1918, between 50 and 100 million people died within two years.
Mineo: What lessons did experts learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?
Jonas: There have been many books and papers written about the 1918 flu pandemic, and one of the main themes is how quickly it was forgotten, how fast it disappeared from the political discourse. I guess the lesson is to never forget because forgetting doesn’t lead to positive public health outcomes. We have had some global public health emergencies since then, but they have been less prominent: HIV/AIDS since the 1980s, SARS in 2003, and the 2009 H1N1pandemic influenza. What’s interesting is that all these events have caught authorities and the general public by surprise, but scientists who have been studying pandemics were not surprised.
A lesson we should remember is that governments have the responsibility to prepare for a pandemic; they have the obligation to invest in public-health systems to protect their citizens from both the threat and the reality of the next pandemic.
