global health

Thirty-two of the world’s largest companies stand to see their profits jump by $109 billion more in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare an economic model that delivers profits for the wealthiest on the back of the poorest, according to a new Oxfam report released this week.

COVID-19 offers mankind a blank page for a new beginning. The question, however, is are we prepared for a fresh start?

Efforts to stem the impact of COVID-19 in low to middle-income countries could be creating a health time bomb in their slum communities by deepening existing inequalities, according to an international team of health researchers led by the University of Warwick.

The latest estimates are that a staggering 3 billion people or more cannot afford a healthy diet. In sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, this is the case for 57 percent of the population – though no region, including North America and Europe, is spared.

Survivors of COVID-19 from 37 countries are among almost 1,000 people who have signed an open letter to pharmaceutical industry leaders calling for a ‘people's vaccine’ and treatments that are available to all.

The Duterte administration has assigned former military generals to deal with Covid-19 and has sent police Special Forces to contain communities.

Notwithstanding all measures put in place, and considering the alarming rate of infection of the coronavirus, the inevitable eventually happened. On 12 March 2020, Ghana Health Service under the Ministry of Health confirmed the first two COVID-19 cases in the country. The cases have since been rising daily with the COVID-19 story yet to end. To this point, Ghana has recorded 46,222 cases of COVID-19 cases with 45,417 recoveries and 299 deaths.

Timely interventions and health actions are not the only aspects that enabled the Kerala model of COVID-19 response to be unique. It focused a lot on preparing Kerala as a society to face this adverse condition by building people’s trust in its health system.

While this pandemic may have created new forms of exclusion, strategies and tools exist to address health promotion, whilst continuing to communicate for peace in conflict-affected contexts. The design of an integrated peacebuilding and technical health response, which is sensitive to individual conflicts’ dynamics and keeps in mind communication challenges such as misinformation, mistrust and reduced interpersonal contact, is crucial.

In many African countries, infection prevention and control measures aimed at preventing infections in health facilities are still not fully implemented.