And its performance in terms of health outcomes is terrible. The UK’s healthcare system model is almost unique globally. If another pandemic is going to come in a decade or three, which of these approaches do we want to have taken? Would we prefer to have developed resources to cope sufficiently that we need no social restrictions or would we prefer not to devote resources to developing such surge capacity but instead accept that once every few decades we might have 18 months of lockdowns and other significant restrictions? There may well be a choice between having greater surge capacity in healthcare and having greater social restrictions upon our lives. If something similar to Covid, or perhaps even worse, is on its way in only a decade or three, we probably ought to be thinking now about what we would want to do when it arrives.ĭuring Covid, some countries or regions (like Florida) were able to tough it out with only very limited restrictions because their healthcare capacity wasn’t ever at material risk of being overwhelmed. Instead we’d have to find other ways to get by: standing ready to repurpose other resources, say, or perhaps being willing to have short lockdowns to buy time.īut if serious pandemics are actually 10 to 30 year events and it just happens that we had two in a row that were fairly mild, then our attitude to the allocation of resources should perhaps be rather different.
If we were only going to need to deal with a serious pandemic once per century it would probably make little sense to aim continuously to provide enough surge capacity – eg critical care beds and ventilators – to cope when the evil day came. If we knew that San Francisco would experience a major earthquake once per century it wouldn’t make any sense to provide enough fire engines, continuously, to cover every blaze that might occur in that extreme case.Ī similar principle applies to healthcare. An event that is going to occur only once a century is not likely to be able to justify providing capacity to deal with it properly when it comes. This difference in picture has potentially very significant policy implications. Had the 1970s Russian Flu and the 2000s Swine Flu been three or four times as bad, mass-killing pandemics would now be seen as rather common events, occurring every one to three decades, instead of the “once in a lifetime” or “once in a century” picture of them we might wish were true. Yet with the hindsight that Covid gives us, that looks much more like brute luck. Whereas there were major pandemics in 1889-90, 1918-1920, 1957-69, the two most acute pandemics of my first five decades – the Russian Flu of 1977-79 and the Swine Flu of 2009 – were much tamer affairs each killing much less than 1 million people worldwide. I was born in 1970, and grew up in an era that, though few recognised it at the time, was very unusual and fortunate in its lack of significant pandemics.
0 kommentar(er)
