The World Health Organization (WHO) is planning to study the public health and social measures that countries have used to keep COVID-19 at bay successfully – in case there is no quick vaccine for the next pandemic.

A special working group has been set up with the support of Norway to study these measures, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told Monday’s WHO COVID-19 media briefing.

“The emergence of more transmissible variants means public health and social measures may need to be more stringent and applied for longer, in areas where vaccination rates remain low,” said Dr Tedros.

“To improve the evidence base on the effectiveness of public health and social measures, WHO is collecting data from around the world on which measures are used and the level at which they are applied.”

However, he warned that it was hard to study these measures because countries typically use a range of them at the same time, and “untangling the precise impact of each individual measure can be challenging”. 

Norway’s Minister of Health and Care services, Bent Høie, told the briefing: “We have been lucky this time. The next pandemic may behave differently from COVID-19 and we may have to depend on public health and social measures for a much longer time in the next pandemic before vaccines are available.” 

Although thousands of scientific papers have been produced about the science of COVID-19, very few have examined the impact of measures such as wearing masks, social distancing, testing-and-tracing and travel restrictions, said Høie.

“Even though most countries have been using these restrictive measures extensively for more than a year, our knowledge on the precise effects of each of these measures is unclear, and the effects are difficult to research,” he added.

The WHO working group will examine the impact, social and economic costs of the different measures used, and develop better tools that can be deployed during the next pandemic, he added.

Countries Need Help with Vaccination Preparedness

“Globally, the number of new cases of COVID-19 reported to WHO has now declined for seven weeks in a row, which is the longest sequence of weekly declines during the pandemic so far,” said Tedros.

However, he added that the decline masked a “worrying increase” in many countries.

“The steep increase in Africa is especially concerning, because it is the region with the least access to vaccines, diagnostics and oxygen,” said Tedros, pointing out that around 420 people would have died of COVID-19 during the hour-long briefing.

While Tedros welcomed the G7 Summit’s announcement on Sunday that it would donate 870 million vaccine doses, he stressed that “we need more, and we need them faster”.

A wide range of civil society organisations have condemned the G7 for failing to agree to the UK’s call to donate one billion vaccine doses. Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown told Sky News that the G7 leaders were guilty of an “unforgivable moral failure” for failing to donate the vaccines.

The majority of the vaccine donations will be Pfizer vaccines, which need to be transported and stored in ultra-cold conditions – although once they have been taken out of cold storage, they can be kept in normal refrigeration for up to three months, according to Mariangela Simao, WHO’s Assistant Director General for Access to Medicines. 

But Dr Mike Ryan, WHO’s Director of Health Emergencies, warned that the logistics around cold chain management and vaccination rollouts was complex.

“Countries need assistance in preparing for that. A second tragedy will be to have vaccines and not be able to use them properly. And there is underfunding right now of basic preparedness in many, many countries. We would urge donors and others to not only just fund vaccines, but to fund the operations needed to deliver those vaccines, and to fund the agencies like UNICEF, like ourselves and other NGOs who are working very closely with governments to improve their capacity to deliver vaccines.”

Addressing the $16 billion shortage faced by COVAX, the global vaccine platform, Ryan pointed out that this was around 1% of a year’s spending on global military defence. 

“Surely we can afford 1% of that to save lives, and bring this pandemic to an end?” asked Ryan.

Image Credits: Cross River State Primary Health Care, Nigeria , Flickr: Joseph Gage, Rahul Basharat Rajput.