OPINION:
As of Tuesday, Feb. 4, the Wuhan coronavirus had infected 20,438 people in 23 countries, killing a total of 427 people. Only two of these deaths were outside of China, with Hong Kong and the Philippines suffering one fatality each.
While the lion’s share of the cases remains in China, new victims of the disease are being reported in different parts of the world. The bigger concern is that the disease may soon arrive in countries whose underdeveloped health systems and enable the disease to spread like wildfire in a dry forest.
A global response is already underway, with the World Health Organization (WHO) actively involved with China. However, that response is hampered by tensions between the United States, the most significant actor in global public health, and China. Moreover, the breakout of this virus has exposed the under-preparedness of many of the developing countries, a major fault line to global health security.
After the Ebola crisis of 2014, the world launched the Global Health Security Agenda to address the global threat of infectious disease. Now is the time for the world to come together to implement it, and the United States can play a leading role.
The current coronavirus outbreak, while a deadly challenge, is a challenge that is being attended to with the appropriate global and regional tools and resources. While the WHO is the United Nations agency responsible for coordinating global health responses, it cannot adopt policies more proactive than whatever its largest country members (in this case, China) have in place.
Therefore, the crisis is a wake-up call for the international community to come together and ensure that the world does not enter into a panic when the next disease (of the coronavirus scale) hits.
This year, the heads of state of the seven largest advanced economies of the world will gather in Camp David for the 2020 G-7 Summit, a meeting that China often attends as well. The United States (as the current head of the G-7 for 2020) should make global pandemic management a primary focus of this year’s G-7 agenda. Given its vast influence in the multilateral space, the G-7 promises to be an appropriate agency for the United States to put the spotlight on the Global Health Security Agenda.
Our success in building global capacity to fight diseases like the coronavirus will not only impact the U.S. homeland security issues and the U.S. economy, but it will also demonstrate the value of U.S. leadership across the globe, renewing our “license” to remain a global superpower. Conversely, if we are seen as not taking a global leadership role when we have the opportunity to do so in the G-7 and the response falters, we will not only pay a health and economic price in the U.S. homeland as the disease spreads but also our standing as a global power will be damaged.
American security, disaster planning and health systems require confronting not only this particular virus but also leading on reinforcing the global infrastructure for early identification and combat of future pandemics. The coronavirus crisis is just one example of a pandemic in the last 20 years, which also includes Ebola, SARS, H5N1 and H1N1.
Despite significant efforts to increase global capacity after the avian flu scare in the 2000s, the 2014 Ebola outbreak demonstrated that the world was not prepared to monitor and manage highly contagious diseases in its most vulnerable countries.
Protecting the homeland from deadly diseases like the coronavirus will require helping a growing number of poor countries upgrade their preparedness. With global mobility on the rise, the 21st century is no longer a time where disease outbreak in one part of the world can stay contained in that region.
Consequently, with the goal of building health care capacity and infrastructure, the United States should consider a supplemental appropriation of foreign aid to help the rest of the world respond to this challenge. This money should be raised as part of a burden-sharing partnership with our G-7 partners.
While we should do everything we can in this hour of need to help the world meet this health emergency, there are a number of questions that China will have to answer when this is over. It is quite possible that the coronavirus is going to be China’s Chernobyl. If China is seen as falling down on the job, even after adopting preventive measures inspired by the SARS pandemic of 2003, then the world will also remember that.
Given that this is a rare occasion where China and the United States have shared interests in ensuring a pandemic-free world, China should be seen as a collaborative partner and the United States should leverage such a partnership to ensure the development of a universally acceptable pandemic-management system.
Furthermore, by allowing China to play a shared role in regions like Africa (a region that has been of great strategic interests for China), the United States can ensure responsible burden-sharing on a global cause, allow China to take credit for its meaningful contribution in the region and preserve the strategic interests of the United States.
During the peak of the Ebola outbreak, the U.S. government found itself in a bind given the absence of the government’s bioterrorism coordinator — a position eliminated by the White House in 2009.
The lesson here for the Trump administration is that an interagency process — involving the Departments of State and Defense, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the USAID — should come together and invest in the production and innovation of critical logistical assets (such as light-weight biohazard suits and vaccinations that can fight mutations of deadly microbodies).
Without causing alarm and unwarranted panic, the international community must work together to contain the spread of the coronavirus and simultaneously prepare itself for future similar pandemics. Given its global implications, international institutions are critical to developing an international pandemic-management system.The G-7, in particular, offers itself as an appropriate and timely platform where the United States can lead on this effort.
In doing so, it can not only mitigate the damage from coronavirus, but also reinforce a proactive response to future global health threats, including putting in place surveillance centers in regions where such diseases usually emerge, stockpiling critical supplies near likely sources of outbreaks for rapid response, and designating international teams “in reserve” that could be called-up in an emergency.
• Daniel F. Runde holds the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. John Simon is managing partner of Total Impact Capital and was recently co-chairman of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
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