The writer is a former SAPM Health.
IT may sound premature to talk about ‘thereafter’ when the third wave of Covid-19 is raging. But it isn’t really too early. How countries respond to health emergencies is a direct function of how prepared they were at the time the emergency struck. Indeed, ‘health emergency’ can be a pure health issue, like the pandemic, or it can be corollary to any other local or national catastrophe such as earthquakes, floods and famine.
As the Covid-19 experience has shown, we were least prepared to face a health emergency. Despite Pakistan being prone to disasters, we have not systematically invested in health-related emergency preparations and hence our haphazard responses. The range of our lack of preparation for health emergencies extends across policies and operations. In 2016, WHO sponsored an independent evaluation of our “core capacities” to prevent, detect and respond to health threats in Pakistan. A big team of international experts spent weeks across the country to assess in detail 19 technical areas in the context of the International Health Regulations (2005) including the state of pandemic preparation. The evaluation team produced an elaborate report with detailed recommendations to improve the national health emergency infrastructure and operation but there has been hardly any implementation.