Want to prevent the next pandemic? We’ll need a more powerful World Health Organisation

Would things be different if the WHO had declared Covid-19 a pandemic weeks sooner than March 11,2020, which would have underlined the urgency of a global response? — Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service

ONLY a handful of places – including Taiwan, Vietnam and New Zealand – acted in time to contain the coronavirus last year, causing the world to spend trillions of dollars fighting an infection that has led to the deaths of more than three million people so far.

In fact, a new analysis from the University of Washington DC’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated a higher number of Covid-19 deaths – nearly 6.9 million across the world. According to the report which came out on Thursday, many deaths go unreported as most countries only record those that occur in hospitals or of patients with a confirmed infection.