What the COVID-19 pandemic taught me

The COVID-19 pandemic threat came as the biggest shock that no country in the world was prepared for. Countries struggled to come to grips with the outbreak and contain it before it became uncontrollable. Though, such outbreaks were not really unheard of or unexpected. Throughout the human history, there have been numerous such outbreaks of diseases all over the world that shook entire nations, economies, societies, civilizations and mankind as a whole. With the advancements in Science and Technology, we made the world a global village which made it way easier for the spread of such outbreaks through all the available modes of transport (not just people, mind you!).

The governments, their policies, the politics, numerous levels of tiresome navigation of the bureaucracies, big pharma corps, cut downs of the research funding, and many more such factors lead to the failure of development of medicines/ vaccines before such outbreaks ever really occurred which could have equipped the various developed and developing countries that had a strong science and biotechnology ground, with the readiness to fight and survive such outbreaks. The unpreparedness plunged nations into crippling and paralyzing halts. The viruses mutate and adapt into newer versions every new recorded outbreak of a disease and since the human immunity systems are not prepared and unaware of the newer version(s), it becomes a losing battle against the virus(es) for the exposed human populace and a winning ground for that version of the virus which leaves behind a trail of succumbing human bodies in the wake of the disease caused by it.

In such times, the health care workers who are on the front lines are the people who are at elevated risk of exposure to the contagion. If that workforce is reduced by a considerable percentage, the whole health care system already overwhelmed and over-crowded with an ailing inflow of patients, is at odds with the virus’s rampage.

I could make one and the most important observation from all of this is that, education all around the world should be cross-functional, meaning the graduating students should be readied in a way that they are able to fit into multiple roles if such need arises, as in a national emergency, international public health emergency/ crisis. With shortage of health care workers (due to many reasons), people with graduate degrees, should be able to fill in those roles/ gaps with a minimum transition time to hold the frontline and fight the pandemic medical emergencies.