Why is the world still being hit by wave after wave of Covid when we know how to stop it?

For the past eight months, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response has been rigorously reviewing the evidence of what happened to allow Covid-19 to take a firm grip – and why. The panel spoke to hundreds of experts and people on the frontline of the response, and conducted extensive original research and numerous literature reviews. Our report, issued today, is firm but fair in its examination of how a series of failures led to the biggest health, social, and economic disaster in living memory. The time it took from the reporting of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown origin at the end of December 2019 to the declaration of an international public health emergency was too long. February 2020 was also a “lost month” for containing the spread of the virus.

 Rapid and consistent actions from the outset could have made our world look very different today.

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