COVID-19: Can this crisis be transformative for global health?
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Date
2020
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Abstract
The UN has described the health, social and economic consequences of
Covid-19 as a global crisis unlike any other encountered in its history.
Although a pandemic of this nature was not unforeseeable, its arrival
seems to have caught the world off guard, hurling us into a state of
partly haphazard disaster mitigation. It has shed sharper light on the
failure of global health in its current form to tackle acute and systemic
challenges in a rapidly changing world, and the unequal patterns in
society that leave us vulnerable. This commentary argues that, despite
its devastating effects, the Covid-19 pandemic can be a longer-term
positively transformative event for global health. However, this will
require going beyond the development of more effective plans for
health emergency preparedness, to confront the crisis in global health
governance and leadership, and rethink the roles of key actors involved
in world health. It ultimately calls us back to the very concept of ‘global
health’: the values it should encompass, what we should expect from it
and how we might envisage reshaping or ‘co-creating’ it for the future.
Description
Keywords
COVID-19, Pandemic preparedness, Global health, Governance, WHO, Disaster mitigation, United Nations
Citation
Marisa Casale (2020) COVID-19: Can this crisis be transformative for global health?, Global Public Health, 15:11, 1740-1752, DOI: 10.1080/17441692.2020.1811366