COVID-19: Updates from Singapore – Global Solidarity
Published: 18 Sep 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 24th and final webinar session organised by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine was held on Thursday, 17 September at 7pm.
This episode featured 16 thought leaders around the world, who shared their hopes, fears and gave their views on why global solidarity matters for the world to rise from the pandemic. Below are a few key highlights:
The session opened with an address by Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Dr Tedros reminded the audience that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exploited political fault lines, inequalities and gaps in national health systems. Over the past 20 years, countries have not invested enough in public health, and this pandemic has brought about far-reaching and long-lasting impacts, affecting services relating to nutrition, immunisation, non-communicable diseases and family planning, among others. Dr Tedros called for the world to work with the tools already at our disposal, preventing COVID-19 from amplifying events, to protect the vulnerable, educate and empower communities and persist with public health basics such as good hygiene practices and social distancing. He emphasised that the greatest test that the world is facing now is not scientific or technical but a test of character—countries need to come together and share the fruits of research, instead of adhering to misguided nationalism that only enforces the inequalities and injustice of this world.
Dr Margaret Hamburg, Former Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration and NYC Department of Health, echoed similar sentiments when she called for communities and nations to join together and sustain their commitment to ramping up effective outbreak preparedness and responses, not only to combat this current pandemic but also pandemics of the future. She noted that the COVID-19 catastrophe was predictable. Alarms of an oncoming pandemic have been sounded and ignored for decades, with multiple cycles of complacency and empty promises to prepare public health systems. Dr Hamburg highlighted that now is the time for societies to step up disease surveillance and properly invest in infectious diseases and pandemic preparedness, such as infrastructure for public health and healthcare and other counter-measures.
Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, emphasised that public health institutions have to be the primary blocks on which public health responses are built to solidify public health security. Most political leaders are reliant on science and often turn to scientific advice to design outbreak response strategies. This pandemic has been an eye-opener for the need to invest in health security in advance and consistently building it to ensure its robustness.
Trish Perl, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, emphasised the need to shore up scientific solidarity. This extends to ensuring that decisions are made scientifically, and fighting misinformation as development of new vaccines come forward. There is an urgent need to manage how we message new information to the public thoughtfully, so that we can produce and promote safe projects and products. In the coming days, world leaders and scientific institutions need to continue to build scientific influence to distribute information and bridge gaps in knowledge to regain public trust.
Associate Professor Kenneth Mak, Director of Medical Services from the Ministry of Health in Singapore also mentioned the importance of public trust in combating COVID-19. With an approach based on traditional principles of health management, such as early detection of cases, quick isolation and quarantine, and disrupting chains of transmission, the spread of community infection steadily came under control. Besides, Singapore has learnt the value of using technology to master new care models and the value of data analysis in managing the pandemic. Assoc Prof Mak highlighted that it took a collective effort to lend a helping hand to the vulnerable—from individuals, as well as the private and public sectors, who pooled and contributed resources. It also took a community to adhere to precautionary measures laid out to minimise and prevent transmission. Ultimately for these elements to work, building public trust and citizen engagement is crucial to harness a whole-of-nation approach to fight COVID-19.
Professor Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, agreed that this pandemic has starkly revealed the vulnerable groups in our societies, striking the poorest and most vulnerable groups the hardest. He shared his observation that our societies are more brittle than we realised, because the world is not dealing with just a pandemic but a ‘syndemic’—a combination or an aggregation of three concurrent epidemics. First, the emergence of COVID-19; second; the existence of non-communicable diseases and third; of poverty and inequality. Unless we manage this pandemic as a syndemic, we would have failed to control it, and these issues will continue surging back without us having learnt lessons from it.
In closing, Professor Chong Yap Seng, Dean of the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, reinforced the need for physicians to be trained to possess an integrated understanding of good health and the history of human health, where they protect the sanctity of inquiry and critical thinking to guide their choices and decisions. Above all, nations need to come together and collaborate to fight this pandemic to preserve humanity and future generations, by sharing information and data and building up strong public health institutions and systems.
WATCH: COVID-19 Updates from Singapore: Webinar 24 | Global Solidarity
