The EU’s disease agency has identified four areas where lessons can be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic to better prepare for future global health emergencies.
Taking stock of the long-running pandemic in a report published on Tuesday, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) highlighted the importance of investing in the health workforce.
It stressed that it is essential to recruit, train and retain public health professionals, attract young recruits as the current workforce ages, and provide surge capacity in the event of a public health crisis.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us valuable lessons, and it is important to review and assess our actions to determine what worked and what didn’t,” said ECDC Director Andrea Ammon. She called for action in a number of different areas to be better equipped to deal with future health crises.
These include investing in and strengthening public health staff, improving infectious disease surveillance, strengthening risk communication and community engagement, and encouraging collaboration between organisations, countries and regions.
The report also recommends encouraging data collection and analysis.
The new ECDC report is based on several expert consultations with EU country representatives, reports on lessons learned from various EU/EEA countries and an internal exercise conducted with ECDC staff.
Within weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak in China in late 2019, the virus had spread like wildfire across Europe and the rest of the world. Many countries initially responded by imposing severe restrictions on public life and closing their borders. In the end, vaccination repelled the virus and a semblance of normal life was restored in 2022.
