Fighting For Survival in the Shadow of Covid-19

A nurse dressed in a white hazmat suit stands at a rickety wooden table folding surgical instruments into sheets of blue paper and placing them into a cardboard box on the floor. Next to her sits a white microwave-looking machine, one that is supposed to help sanitize scalpels and forceps, but is on the fritz — the door keeps popping open.

“We have to try and sanitize each tool individually ourselves,” she says. “Then we wrap it to save it for the next surgery.”

The G-20 estimates that $34 billion in public financing per year for five years is needed to help the world prepare for the next pandemic, including strengthening health systems in countries like Ghana.

However, it’s unclear if the world will ultimately take the risks of another pandemic seriously enough to stabilize the health care systems of low-income countries so they can adequately respond. Global Covid funding is beginning to run dry and health facilities in some of these countries are once again trying to figure out how best to manage the virus while also dealing with other systemic diseases. Global health organizations, governments and pharmaceutical companies are focusing on tests, therapeutics and vaccines. But the conversation about dedicating funds to help countries actually absorb and distribute them often has faded into the background.

World health leaders and advocates have for years argued that the international community needs to do more to consistently finance and prop up health systems in low-income countries, including those in Africa, by helping to hire and train staff, provide essential medical supplies and broaden access to supply chains. And in the course of the last several decades, through multiple infectious disease outbreaks, wealthy Western countries have promised to transform the way countries prepare for large-scale health disasters. But, health advocates say, that money is usually attached to emergency funding packages and the cash usually falls off after a few years.

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the U.S. was the largest single-country donor to respond to helping Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone get their health systems back to base — and then more. Congress appropriated $5.4 billion in emergency funding as part of its 2015 spending package through various agencies, many of which only had guaranteed funding for three years or until it ran dry. The next year, the Obama administration moved to repurpose some of the appropriated funds for the U.S. global Zika response.

Source:newslinkghana.com