Flattening the curve on COVID-19: A country-specific comparison
Every day we get new numbers and predictions on the state of COVID-19 in our home community, our country, and around the world. How do these reports compare and contrast with one another when you put all the countries side by side? What can we learn from our current progress, our metrics for tracking, and the efficacy of “flattening the curve”?
A recent webinar by Om Kurmi and students Enrico Rullo and Kyrillos Faragalla explored the data available on the impact of public health interventions on “flattening the curve” in different regions of the world. Kurmi is a respiratory epidemiologist and assistant professor in the McMaster University Department of Medicine. His research team collected and evaluated government databases and reports from major news outlets from selected countries (Canada, US, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, France, China, South Korea, South Africa, Australia) in order to recognize patterns in the timing of decisions and hone in on what has worked.
“The million-dollar question is: when is the current situation going to end?” says Kurmi. To think about this, we need information that is relevant to our global and local situation. However, he points to the Global Health Security Index, which is “the first comprehensive assessment and benchmarking of preparedness for infectious disease across 195 countries” that ranked the US at the top of the list with the best score. “I will leave it up to you to judge how each country truly compares during this current pandemic.”
There is also a difference between proposed interventions and what actually happens on the ground. “It’s one thing for governments to overcome the political inertia to pass these laws. It’s quite another for people to adhere to them”, he says. When looking at timing of interventions, decisions have to be made in determining when a threshold percentage of the population is acting in accordance, and how that can be reliably ascertained.
Kurmi draws attention to the fact that when looking at comparisons between countries, it becomes clear how investment in the health system and prioritization of health matters by the leadership is a key factor in how the COVID19 pandemic impacted its citizens.
“Governments have the power to influence the outcome of this pandemic. We saw that countries with a higher global health security index suffered a lower case fatality early on. Pandemic preparedness before an outbreak even starts can literally save lives”, he says.
Watch the webinar to learn more about the different epidemiological and political measures influenced by COVID-19 in each country and how their interventions worked to “flatten the curve”.
This webinar was one of 10 in a series, Expert Perspectives on Pandemics, which formed part of the Master of Science in Global Health program’s global health symposium. View past webinars.
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