The silver lining Covid pandemic has thrown at us

Students at State House Girls washing their hands during the Global Handwashing Day. [Wilberforce Okwiri, Standard]

As coronavirus ravages the planet killing millions, it is difficult to think of any silver lining to the pandemic. Yet, if we look closely, there are some positive takeaways offered by the global health crisis across several sectors.

On the medical science front, it takes at least a decade from the time a putative molecule is discovered, isolated and developed into something that can be used for human health to alleviate pain and suffering. It then must prove its safety, quality and efficacy through a long process of testing, first in animal models, then in healthy humans, and humans suffering from the particular disease it is meant to cure or ameliorate.

Further time is spent getting supranational and national medicine and technology regulatory authorities to register the medicine or technology in a given country like Kenya or the European Union for use. Currently, medical technologies are being developed in a span of a year or less as happened with the Covid-19 vaccines rather than the normal 10 years.

Equally beneficial are the expedited reviews vaccines were given allowing them to be used within a few days or short weeks of the results of the clinical trials being known rather than several months as is the norm. The silver lining is that this same sense of urgency in the design, development, testing and licensing of medical technologies can be brought to bear to resolve longstanding problems in other areas such as HIV and malaria where effective drugs and technologies are under threat of antimicrobial resistance and new and more effective therapeutics take an inordinate amount of time to be developed and brought to market.

Secondly on the health front, Covid-19 is a godsend to folks who work in water and sanitation programmes, who for years have used every strategy in the book to get us to wash our hands more regularly – before eating or after visiting the washroom.

Simple handwashing with soap and water has been shown to reduce the risk of suffering diarrheal diseases by as much as 44 per cent. Under incessant handwashing owing to Covid, it is a given that diarrheal diseases have markedly declined in Kenya and other countries.

Fourth, use of drones and other digital technologies to deliver medicines and other essential health products which have been piloted in several countries such as Rwanda and Ghana, are likely to pick up leading to improvements in our supply chain management systems. Finally, the pandemic has stressed-tested our health systems pinpointing areas where we need to improve, especially our community health systems which are the first line of defence, but paradoxically where we invest the least amount of resources in our Kenyan health sector.

Many developing countries invest more money in tertiary health systems such as county/sub-national hospitals and national referral hospitals than in community health. Healthcare workers have been at pains for decades to explain the need for robust, resilient health systems to policymakers.

Now that the fragility of our health system is there for all of us to see, and Covid-19 has affected all of us, from presidents to the mama mboga, it makes advocacy for investments in health systems easier to demonstrate in terms of return on investments to society. Not investing in health simply means saying yes to your relative gasping for air as you watch helplessly because there is no oxygen in your nearest facility.

In education, Covid-19 has fast-tracked digitalisation of learning, from just relying on brick-and-mortar education to delivering digital content online. This trend is likely to continue in future, pick up speed, and online degrees will soon become the norm. Online education means less costs on accommodation, travel and boarding schools. So, there are silver linings to Covid-19 after all!

-The writer is a public health specialist.

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Covid-19 Pandemic