A VACCINE will not end the ill effects of the pandemic on health and the economy, according to health experts from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
In an Asian Development Blog, Germany-based Global Health Specialist Martina Merten and ADB Principal Knowledge Sharing and Services Specialist Susann Roth said there is more to emerging victorious against Covid-19 than a vaccine.
Merten and Roth said while immunization is key for avoiding deaths from several infectious diseases and making a vaccine available globally is a major step toward recovery, this should be coupled with efforts to improve health care, including facilities and access, as well as addressing social inequities.
“We should not forget about other measures. We now know that investments in the social determinants of health—in particular, education, income, physical environment, access to health services and paid sick leave—have a major influence on health outcomes. Social inequalities in health have been proven to impact Covid-19 morbidity and mortality,” Merten and Roth said.
The authors also said lockdowns should not be the answer to future pandemics. The spate of lockdowns that governments implemented caused economic growth to plummet.
The Philippines, which implemented one of the longest lockdowns during the pandemic, posted a 16.5-percent contraction in the April-to-June period. The second quarter marked the height of the country’s lockdowns.
Apart from causing economies to reel, Merten and Roth said lockdowns widened social inequality.
The authors cited findings of recent reports that many children, for one, were unable to access education, health care, food and suffered protection risks during the lockdowns.
“The take-home message is this: Lockdowns cannot be the answer in future, especially because they undermine what has been achieved already, in terms of progress made to date on determinants of health. They also widen the social gap,” Merten and Roth said.
Apart from these, Merten and Roth took note of how Covid-19 inspired bludgeon-like responses, considering that about 3 million people die from communicable diseases every year. Nearly half or 1.3 million of them died of tuberculosis in 2016.
They added that HIV/AIDS killed 1 million people in 2016 and the death rate from diarrheal diseases in the same year was 1.4 million.
Merten and Roth said the world fights another “pandemic” of non-communicable diseases which kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 71 percent of all deaths globally.
Many of these deaths, Merten and Roth said, are recorded in low- and middle-income countries like the Philippines.
“We have known for a long time that we need to do more than providing the world with vaccines —as important as immunization undoubtedly is. The world needs, as also mentioned in WHO’s World in Disorder Report, integrated and complex public/global health solutions to be prepared for the next pandemic and all current ones. It needs investments in determinants of health, health systems, education, and good governance,” the authors said.
Data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that registered deaths between January to August exceeded their corresponding monthly averages in the last five years, except for March and April.
PSA said the relatively fewer registered deaths in August 2020 were expected since not all deaths were registered yet as per reglementary period.
The preliminary number of registered deaths from January to August 2020 reached 371,880, lower than the total registered deaths of 408,788 in the same period in 2019.