The World Is Ill-Prepared to Prevent Another Pandemic

While the world’s overall preparedness score in the 2021 Global Health Security Index isn't particularly good, it is markedly worse in the Prevention category. The global average score for the prevention of the emergence or release of pathogens is just 28.4 out of 100, as 113 countries are found to show “little to no attention” to zoonotic diseases, i.e. diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans, such as Covid-19 according to current knowledge.

As the following chart shows, other categories also score far below the maximum of 100, with just one of the six pillars of health security reaching a global average score above 50. Worryingly, it’s the early stages of an epidemic, pandemic where the world seems particularly vulnerable. With a global average Prevention score of 28.4 out of 100 and an Early Detection & Reporting score of 32.3, the world seems dangerously underprepared to stop a future epidemic before it becomes a pandemic.