HEALTHY SECURITY CAPACITY ANALYSIS

Introduction

The paper analyses the annual report of International Health Regulations among one hundred and eighty-two countries globally. The analysis is done to do a health assessment of these countries’ security capacities in the situation of COVID-19. The analysis enables countries to make some considerable attempt in preventing, detecting, and responding to public healthy pandemics by strengthening their capacities. The countries will have a better understanding of prevention, detection, and responding because through the International Health Regulations, which is coordinated, evaluation and monitoring tasks will be done. To solve the country’s unpreparedness to tackle the novel coronavirus disease, the paper performed a five-index assessment on each of the 182 countries selected.  These indices were the country’s capacity to put some prevention measures, make detection, how was the response to the calamity, what the enabling functions, and finally the country’s operational readiness. The last index in which operational readiness is vital for government worldwide in placing their priorities aligned to the report in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic.

Literature Review

In (Jacobsen,2020) Nirmal Kandel and colleagues did an analysis based on the operational readiness index using 18 indicators to come up with a summary of the country’s preparedness in detecting, responding, and preventing outbreaks of infectious diseases like the COVID-19. Their summary indicated that 104 countries of the 182 analyzed countries showed that they had the capacity to handle critical issues on subnational and national levels. These 104 countries represented a percentage of 57. 32% of the countries were shown a deficient level of preparedness.

The paper’s inference related to the Global Health Security Index one similar to the previous WHO assessments. A deep concern concerning preparedness deficiencies was expected as CONID-19 had already been reported in some countries. Some actions were highlighted in the article, which can lower the global threat posed by the pandemic. The first measure was to implement the IHR fully across all the counties globally. The second measure calls for accelerating the progressive achievement of the target and priorities, which were outlined in the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Methodology

The 2018 SPAR submissions dataset was used to review the health security capacities based on five indices: prevention, detection, respondents, operational readiness, and enabling function. The SPAR dataset can support data in sequence produced from several experimental protocols such as short total Ribonucleic Acid sequencing, mRNA-seq, single-cell small Ribonucleic Acid -sequence microRNA-sequence. This dataset can allow an individual to relate the input experiment to reference DASHR/ENCODE datasets. The SPAR by now can support the analysis of mouse (mm10) sequencing data and humans (hg19, hg38).

To review the health security capacities based on the ability to detect, prevent, respond, enabling function and operational readiness, the 2018 SPAR submission was analyzed. 18 SPAR indicators out of the total of 24 were used in all the 5 indices because the 6 indicators of SPUR were not directly associated with the indices and infectious threat hazards, such as for the case COVID-19.  Each SPAR indicator could score in the scale range of levels one and five, five being the highest and one being the lowest. Level 0 was used to show countries that had no score at all.

Four steps were followed for each of the fives to develop an index score. These steps included a grouping of the SPAR submission’s key indicators as per the 5 indices. Secondly, a conversion to the percentage of each indicator is performed.  After the conversion, with the help of the arithmetic average, each indicator score is aggregated. Finally, the categorization of the 182 countries on an ordinal scale is performed. The ordinal scale has 1-5 levels, which is based on each of the indices’ scores.

After analyzing the 2018 SPAR submissions across all the 182 countries, it was noted that the data set was not found in the 14 state parties and therefore were excluded from the study. 76% of the countries, which is 138 out of the 182 states, had a detection capacity of level 4 or level 5 according to the analysis. It was also found that 28% of the countries had a prevention capacity level of 1 or 2 while on respondence capacity, 33% of the counties had levels 1 and 2. Among the 33% are countries with low-income or middle-income, according to the World Bank. 44% of the countries had level 5 or 4 capacities on their prevention capacity, and 43% of the countries were having level 5 or 4 capacities on respondence, while 56% of the countries were having level 5 or 4 on enabling function capacities.

Analysis figure of the 2018 SPAR submissions on 182 member states.

Discussion, Analysis, and Conclusions and future work

There is a lot of variation in the country’s capacity for outbreak prevention, detection, and control despite all the counties being vulnerable to COVID-19 infections. This COVID -19 context is even worsening because it is new to everyone and has not been understood fully. Therefore, it is necessary to combine existing facts with the most recent COVID-19 risk assessments and other assessments to enable a better understanding of the capacities. Most third-world countries are still struggling to contain the cases within their borders despite the considerable gains made to understand the pathogen. This, therefore, is a clear indication that efforts are needed to make sure that the vulnerable countries can respond to public health happenings, for example, the outbreak of COVID-19.

There is also a need for scientists globally to share data and knowledge on how the novel Covid-19 vaccine can be found. So far, no framework can allow scientists to put their brains together and develop a long-term solution to the issue at hand. The author also failed to address the model used to assist the identified vulnerable groups based on the classification levels.

References.

Jacobsen, K. H. (2020). Will COVID-19 generate global preparedness? The Lancet, 395(10229), 1013-1014. (Jacobsen,2020)

Kandel, N., Chungong, S., Omaar, A., & Xing, J. (2020). Health security capacities in the context of COVID-19 outbreak: an analysis of International Health Regulations annual report data from 182 countries. The Lancet.

World Health Organization. (, 2020). Novel Coronavirus (‎2019-Nov)‎: situation report, 3.