Let’s invent a new response

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads globally, it's worth remembering that the pandemic is not really the problem. Rather, it’s the inability of our health system to respond. This isn’t ‘unprecedented’. In the past 100 years, we’ve had 6 ‘flu’ pandemics - Spanish flu, Asian flu, Hong Kong flu, SARS, Swine flu and COVID19. We have outbreaks of disease that make large numbers of us sick. But our global health system is built as if that doesn’t happen. There’s no redundancy so we never have enough beds, medicines, doctors, nurses, hospitals or a way of ramping up our capacity in a hurry. As one example, Western Australia has a population of about 2.6 million people and 162 ICU beds. If an A380 falls out of the sky at Perth Airport, the health system can’t cope. If there is an earthquake, or tsunami, terrorist attack or any other number of entirely predictable high-casualty events, the health system can’t cope. The same is true of every other health system in the world. But our health system, like our economics, is a human construct. We invented it. It’s not the way things have to be. It’s the way we have chosen to make it. We can change it and we need to - because history has shown us there will be another pandemic and many after that. Let’s invent a new response.