Skip to main content

New story in Health from Time: Dr. Larry Brilliant and Dr. Leana Wen on How We Need to Prepare for the Next Pandemic



Dr. Leana Wen likes to remind people that on any given day, public health saved your life—you just don’t know it. The former health commissioner of the city of Baltimore and a visiting professor at the George Washington University Milken School of Public Health, Wen joined Dr. Larry Brilliant—an epidemiologist who worked with the World Health Organization eradicate smallpox— to look at some of the lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and what changes we can make going forward.

Both doctors, in a conversation with TIME’s Alice Park during Thursday’s TIME 100 Talks: Finding Hope, agree that the whole point of a good public health infrastructure is to prevent bad things from happening—to stop disease before it starts—and that takes money and commitment. “How much would you pay to have no fires ever happen? How much would you say to have no burglaries happen?” Brilliant asks. The answer: a lot, but when it comes to public health, we’re not making the investment.

“We’re successful when we prevent disease,” says Wen. “But when something is invisible like that, we become the first thing on the chopping block.” The result has been the loss of tens of thousands of health care workers around the country over the years as governments slash funding and jobs to balance budgets.

Not only must that end, not only must the U.S. re-invest in a robust public health infrastructure—including continuing to help fund the WHO—so too must we realize that in a time when diseases from remote places are just an airplane ride away, we have to become better citizens of the world. “This is not a time to think we can stop a disease at the border in San Francisco or New York City,” Brilliant says. “We need to look at places in Africa where blood-borne diseases begin, or Southeast Asia and South Asia where respiratory or intestinal diseases like cholera begin.”

Both Wen and Brilliant are hopeful—if cautiously so—that the current crisis may lead to the kinds of reforms that can spare us the next pandemic. “I’m optimistic that we can,” Brilliant says. “I’m concerned that we won’t.” The choice, in other words, is entirely ours.

This article is part of #TIME100Talks: Finding Hope, a special series featuring leaders across different fields sharing their ideas for navigating the pandemic. Want more? Sign up for access to more virtual events, including live conversations with influential newsmakers.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

New story in Health from Time: COVID-19 Has Been ‘Apocalyptic’ for Public Transit. Will Congress Offer More Help?

While trying to get to work over the past few months, Brittany Williams, a Seattle home care worker, has often been passed by two or three buses before one stops to let her board. Buses in her area that once carried anywhere from about 50 to 100 passengers have been limited to between 12 and 18 to prevent overcrowding in response to coronavirus, and Williams’ commute, typically a half-hour ride, now takes more than double that time. Other Seattle transit riders have described budgeting as much as an extra hour per trip to account for the reduced capacity, eating into their time at work, school or with family. Even with the ridership limits in place, Williams, 34, doesn’t feel safe on public transit. Some passengers don’t wear face coverings, and bus drivers sometimes ignore capacity limits, she says. On one ride with her seven-year-old son, she decided to get off at a stop far from her home after a driver allowed a crowd of people to board. “It’s very trying. I’ll put...
Read more

New story in Health from Time: An At-Home Coronavirus Test May Be On the Way in the U.S.

As cases of COVID-19 continue to climb in the U.S. , there’s a new urgency to make sure there are as many tests as possible to diagnose people who have symptoms that might indicate an infection. Knowing if people are positive is important for guiding their next steps: self-isolation, avoiding contact with others, and, if their symptoms get worse, seeking medical care. To date, access to tests has been spotty at best across the country, and while more kits are now available than even a week ago , most are gene-based assays that take several days for commercial labs to process and produce results. That may change in about two months if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gives Emergency Use Authorization to the first blood-based COVID-19 test in the U.S. Scanwell Health, an at-home test company based in California, licensed the rights to a test developed by Chinese company Innovita, which was used extensively at the height of country’s epidemic earlier this year. “The ...
Read more

New story in Health from Time: A Montana Care Home Refused Free COVID-19 Tests. Now, Nearly Every Resident Has Coronavirus

(BILLINGS, Mont.) — It was meant to be a last line of defense to protect the most vulnerable as the coronavirus spread across the United States : Montana officials offered free testing in May for staff and residents at assisted living and long-term care facilities. But not all of them followed through, according to state data, including a facility in Billings, Montana’s largest city, that cares for people with dementia and other memory problems. The virus has infected almost every resident and killed eight, accounting for almost a quarter of Montana’s 34 confirmed deaths. Thirty-six employees also have tested positive at the facility where 59 people lived before the deaths began. Read more: ‘It’s Getting Worse.’ Nursing Home Workers Confront Risks in Facilities Devastated by Coronavirus While Montana’s rates of confirmed infections and deaths are much lower than other parts of the country, the outbreak at Canyon Creek Memory Care illustrates that even the most simple an...
Read more