Five years ago, the NBA canceled the rest of its season in response to rapidly rising COVID-19 cases. It was then that people began to take COVID-19 seriously, according to Craig Spencer, associate professor of the practice of health services, policy and practice.

Moderated by Director of the Pandemic Center Jennifer Nuzzo, the School of Public Health and Warren Alpert Medical School co-hosted “The Next Global Pandemic: How ready are we?” on March 5. The event commemorated the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nuzzo said in an interview with The Herald.

Panelists included Adam Levine, director of the Center for Global Health Equity and the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies; Theresa Raimondo ’11, an assistant professor of engineering; Scott Rivkees, associate dean for education and professor in the SPH; and Larry Warner ’97 MPH’13, chief impact and equity officer at United Way of Rhode Island.

The event began with an introduction by Spencer, where he shared his experiences working as an emergency medicine doctor at the start of the pandemic.

“It was like walking into the apocalypse,” he said. “Those initial days were dominated by fear and uncertainty.”

In 2020, Rivkees was Florida’s surgeon general. He described how the rain ditches in Florida’s Emergency Operations Center, where he worked, were built to withstand category five hurricanes, but instead of collecting rainwater, the ditches served a different purpose during the pandemic.

“People would literally leave their post-stations, go out and lie in these ditches and would cry, and then they would dust themselves off, and then would come back and do their job,” Rivkees said.

Although five years have passed since the panelists’ experiences, Nuzzo pointed out the importance of applying lessons learned to the future.

For Warner, the COVID-19 pandemic underscored that addressing these crises goes beyond providing vaccines and medical care.

“We also learned about the importance of addressing social needs and how that impacts people's vulnerability to COVID-19 and our ability to connect to resources,” he said.

Strong public health communication is also crucial according to Warner, who said that “society has not been very forgiving” to public health experts for not having “all the answers up front.”

Pandemic-related misinformation was a key issue with public health communication, panelists said.

Levine explained how COVID-19 data dashboards “made the rich countries look like they had been hit” harder than poorer countries, when in reality, countries with higher GDP just had more COVID-19 tests.

“All babies sleep through the night, if only you turn off the monitor,” Levine said. “If you have zero COVID-19 testing sites, then you have zero COVID cases and zero COVID deaths.”

For the panelists, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the relationship between public health and politics.

“If you look over the first 18 months of the pandemic, the biggest risk factor for dying was age,” Rivkees said. “Past 18 months, your biggest risk factor was whether you voted for President Trump.”

Since then, Rivkees said the country has grown “even more polarized.”

Public health PhD student Margaret Dunne GS, who attended the event, agreed with Nuzzo’s point that it is “really important” to reflect on the past to improve the future.

“A million Americans died during the pandemic, and I think it’s on us as public health practitioners and people who care about autonomy that we learn lessons,” Dunne said.

Panelists ended by discussing their predictions for responses to future pandemics.

“COVID is not a one-off,” Nuzzo told The Herald. “It’s behind us, thankfully, but we are going to have to deal with more of these types of events in our future.”

Raimondo took an optimistic stance, pointing out that healthcare professionals have a “much more robust understanding” of advancing vaccines and providing a better “clinical response to patients with different backgrounds” as a result of the pandemic.

But many of the speakers at the event were concerned about government responses to future pandemics, including Nuzzo, who described the current moment as “the luxury of amnesia.”

“We’re at a moment where few people recognize that an outbreak abroad can be an outbreak here, and then there is critical importance in keeping our infrastructure for responding to such outbreaks,” Spencer said. “We are tearing that down actively at this moment, and I promise we will regret it.”

Five years ago next Tuesday, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic involving a dangerous new virus—and across the planet, life as we knew it ground to a shuddering halt. But the COVID emergency started well before that. Rewind to late December 2019: hospitals in Wuhan, China, were filling up with cases of a mysterious pneumonia. By January 2020, as the body count started to mount and Wuhan was locked down, other countries began reporting cases. The virus spread like an invisible airborne poison through a cruise ship quarantined off the coast of Japan. Italy became a hotspot of infection. One by one, countries and U.S. states issued stay-at-home orders, and major cities went eerily quiet. Within weeks, New York City hospitals filled up with desperately ill people. The dead piled up so quickly that refrigerated trucks were used as temporary morgues.

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A disruption of current HIV/Aids mitigation programmes in southern Africa will lead to decreased access to critical treatments and preventive therapies, which will in turn lead to increased mortality and mother-to-child transmission.

For decades, the United States has been a critical player in supporting the response to HIV/Aids in southern Africa. However, recent shifts in US policy as mandated by executive orders from the second Trump administration threaten to disrupt life-saving humanitarian aid programmes, posing profound danger to pan-African public health and economic stability, in addition to global health security.

Southern Africa has long been the epicentre of the global HIV/Aids pandemic, with Botswana, South Africa and neighbouring countries experiencing some of the highest infection rates in the world – in several cases exceeding 20% of the total adult population.

Botswana, for example, has an adult HIV prevalence rate of about 23% (for reference, any country with HIV infection rates above 1% is determined a Generalized HIV Epidemic per the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids); South Africa, the most affected country worldwide by case volume, has an estimated 7.7 million people, people living with HIV/Aids, of which 5.9 million are on antiretroviral therapy.