Science and global public health guidance in the time of COVID-19
Published: 30 Aug 2020
The “COVID-19: Updates from Singapore” weekly webinar series is a forum for leading clinicians, scientists, public health officials and policy makers to share insights from their fields of study. The 21st webinar session was held on Thursday, 27 August at 7pm.
Dr Maria D. Van Kerkhove, an experienced infectious disease epidemiologist and the current COVID-19 Health Operations and Technical Lead technical consultant for the World Health Organisation (WHO), was this week’s invited guest speaker. Titled Science and Global Public Health Guidance in the Time of COVID-19, Dr Van Kerkhove fielded questions posed by Associate Professor David Allen and shared her insights on SARS-CoV-2 transmission, school closures, lockdowns, communicating science to stakeholders and steps taken to generate evidence-based global public health guidance during a pandemic.
Dr Van Kerkhove started off by explaining the role of the WHO, which mainly develops guidance by reviewing and consolidating evidence, organising international work groups for collected evidence to be shared, subsequently using these facts to generate advice on how to do contact tracing, prepare and prevent outbreaks. It was especially difficult at the start to gather information, when the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen first emerged. Yet, WHO managed to issue a package of guidance that included surveillance guidance, laboratory guidance, infection prevention and control guidelines, clinical management information of how to treat people with respiratory illnesses and a readiness checklist within 10 days of being notified of the cluster in Wuhan. Dr Van Kerkhove elaborated that they adapted the existing guidance from the MERS coronavirus to the evolving COVID-19 situation. This was done through information-gathering from the situation in Wuhan and pulling together expert networks, consisting of contributions from thousands of scientists all over the world who specialised in different technical areas from epidemiology to clinical management and virology. WHO is the central agent responsible for ensuring that new research, which are constantly coming in, are properly critiqued for their robustness and accuracy, so that knowledge can be pulled together across different disciplines and evaluated on how it can be turned into advice for countries and governments to follow.
Dr Van Kerkhove highlighted that educating of people who lack scientific literacy comes under WHO’s purview. This involves educating people how to sieve through an overload of information to discern the accuracy and reliability of given information for themselves. In addition, there is the concerning Internet problem of misinformation. WHO is taking steps to combat it by working with the different communication giants such as Google, YouTube, WhatsApp and other social media portals to make sure that reliable information can be found and have wrong information removed. Dr Van Kerkhove emphasised that science is a process and it is always evolving, so failing to adequately educate, inform and communicate the importance of verifying scientific information with reliable sources would result in a bigger danger for people who do not know any better. WHO takes it one step further by consolidating all proven evidence-based information and debating with the international network of experts before translating it into plans for action.
During these confusing times, Dr Van Kerkhove advised that it is important to maintain good, open and direct communication with the public so that they remain constantly informed. When explaining a complicated subject, answers should be given in simplified language and delivered clearly, comprehensively and succinctly so that it does not give the impression of over-confidence when complete answers are not available.
Above all, Dr Van Kerkohve was clear that there is no room for distractions. She highlights that WHO is determined to stay the course by supporting countries and people everywhere, to constantly review research and its evidence, ensuring that public information stays updated. There is also the added responsibility of making sure that essential medical services for other illnesses and immunisation programmes continue, while battling COVID-19.
WATCH: COVID-19 Updates from Singapore: Webinar 21 | Dr Maria D Van Kerkhove
Join us this week on 3 September 2020 as guest speaker Sir Jeremy James Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust, will be speaking on the “Strategies to Mitigate the Rippling Impact of COVID-19 – From Virus-Host Interaction to Geopolitics”. Register now at https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/cet/webinar/.
