As a child, I often asked my parents where they were when major world events occurred: the day Winston Churchill was returned to 10 Downing Street, the day Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind, and the days John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. All of this happened before I was born, so my mother and father, and the stories they told me, provided a link to the historical markers of the post-war period.
Unlike all of these events, there is no official date for the global pandemic we now know as COVID-19. Scientists have not yet established when, where, nor how it first emerged – and perhaps we may never know. But similar to AIDS – which is traced to June 1981, when the first cases in New York and Los Angeles appeared in a publication of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention – I think of COVID-19 in terms of the day it impacted the world.
On January 23 this year, I was rushing to JFK for my early morning flight to Hong Kong, one day before Chinese New Year Eve and the traditional reunion dinner that typically occurs on that evening. Traffic was light in New York, but as time was tight, I made it to the airport, through security, and onto the plane before I saw the news coming out of Wuhan: that city, and eventually 14 others in Hubei province, had been locked down.
The world was officially transformed.
“Lockdown”, a term familiar only to those old enough to remember the 9/11 attacks, has now become part of the global vocabulary, regardless of demographic. In the current context, working from home in many industries has become the norm rather than the exception. Lockdown means that the anti-vaccine movement has been put on pause as scientists collaborate to find a cure. Producers of personal protective equipment are trading higher than some of the world's best-known brands. Panic buying at supermarkets, pharmacies, and even gun shops have become commonplace; and, as such, concerns over where we're going to find our most basic necessities are reshaping the conversations we have with our families.
Today, we are required to respond in unprecedented ways to an unprecedented threat. And while we may have found ways to muddy through the global financial crisis in 2008, we are not properly positioned to prepare for the 'future of now': climate change, endemic poverty and hunger, COVID-19, and more.
Last September, in my capacity as a World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassador, I joined world leaders at the launch of the report of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, an independent body intended to track the next health emergency and the accountability of governments. The warning from the participating leaders, including World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was very clear: a disease epidemic or pandemic that would cause significant loss of lives, upend economies, and create social chaos was on its way. It was a question of “if”, not “when”. Yet all of this ultimately fell on deaf ears, and my concern is that it will continue to do so.
In late January, when the lockdown in Wuhan began, our team at The China Current – a partner platform of China-US Focus – stopped our regular work and moved to a complete focus on COVID-19. Our mission was to offer human stories impacted by the outbreak and interviews with leaders in health, science, and diplomacy shaping the response. Fifty episodes later, we have created a body of content that provides a public record of the virus when it happened, as it happened.
But what have we learned in that process?
On a personal level, COVID-19 has revolutionized the way I work. As a television news anchor, I am used to working with multiple camera crews, sound engineers, and lighting technicians. But there was no such opportunity this time around. The urgency to communicate the knowledge of a new virus meant learning to work in ways I haven't before. Our first interview with former WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan, for example, was conducted over a landline phone.
But with the exception of Dr. Arthur Reingold, head of epidemiology at Berkeley's School of Public Health, all of our subsequent interviews have been done over FaceTime, WhatsApp, and WeChat. The video is grainy, and the sound isn't great, but it allows us to communicate with interviewees in real-time. Some of those conversations have helped steer the public narrative and understanding on COVID-19. We spoke to Professor Sharon Lewin soon after her laboratory at the Doherty Institute became the first outside China to isolate the virus. We connected with WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan weeks before trials of repurposed drugs and candidate vaccines began. And we heard from Professor Gabriel Leung, who, as a key member of the WHO-China Joint Mission, was in the first line of experts to look at the gender and age of people first affected by the virus.
There is a lot that we still don't know about COVID-19, and until we do, it will be extremely challenging to create effective therapies and cures. We still have to understand the origins of the virus, when and how it jumped from animals to humans, and whether there was an intermediary animal in between the two. Moreover, while there is tremendous urgency and excitement about a possible vaccine, the cold, hard truth is that there may never be one.
Almost forty years after AIDS, there is still no vaccine or cure. But as one of history's most prolific epidemics, it offers a textbook example that encourages mobilizing communities in the response, adopting a people-centered and human rights approach, and designing a vision that is based on science. It is no coincidence that major figures from the AIDS community have been repurposed for this new effort, most notably in the United States, where Dr. Tony Fauci has made significant research contributions to HIV and other immunodeficiencies, and Dr. Debbie Birx, who, as head of PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), is effectively America's AIDS and health ambassador to the world.
AIDS and COVID-19 are very different in their epidemiology, but we must recognize that they are much larger than health crises: they present a major threat to our global security. In our interview with He Yafei, China's former Vice Foreign Minister, Ambassador He described COVID-19 as a “non-traditional security threat” that demands global health governance be embedded into global governance. But our ability to slow and stop a surging pandemic is going to need the cooperation of individuals. Staying at home and maintaining thorough hand hygiene are effective public health measures, but what about those who have access to neither a home nor clean water?
There are growing concerns of community clusters in refugee camps, especially on the African continent which still bears the greatest global health burden. If this fully transpires, it could devastate a region where fragile and underfunded health systems struggle with everyday health needs and exceptional emergencies, such as the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. If this happens, and borders close, it will not only devastate the health of one billion people, but it will dismantle their economies that in turn could push Africa back further than ever.
Clearly, though, this is not a pandemic that impacts Africa only – and it is time for the global north to wake-up to its own vulnerabilities.
COVID-19 will become a place-marker in history. I expect that one day, my children will ask me about the world “before” and “after” COVID-19, but we still have the opportunity to create an ending for this story. Will we idly sit by while infections and deaths accumulate, or will we stand up? The next weeks, months, and maybe years will surely test our resilience, but even more so, they will offer a public record of the human condition at this time, and test whether or not we chose to unite in kindness and compassion.
