Preparing for the next global health crisis: The role of secondary impact modelling
Posted On October 10, 2022
Preparing for the next global health crisis: The role of secondary impact modelling
Author
Jan Kellett, Team Leader, Insurance and Risk Finance Facility, UNDP
Jan Kellett

Team Leader, Insurance and Risk Finance Facility, UNDP

COVID-19 has had and continues to have a devasting impact on people’s lives, on development. For the first time since the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has started calculating human development more than three decades ago, the corresponding index has fallen for the second year in a row, as the 2021/22 Human Development Report shows. With the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, nations’ health, education, and standard of living has fallen back to 2016 levels and reversed much of the progress made in the past decade towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The impact the pandemic has had on lives and livelihoods extends well beyond a global health crisis – we have all witnessed this personally in our own families and communities. Critical public services, such as health care, education, social services, and transportation, were disrupted when workers fell ill or were forced to stay home. Business activities were interrupted by supply chain disruptions and preventive measures, such as quarantine, isolation, and lockdown, while the world economy slowed down to an extent not seen since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Tourism and hospitality sectors were, unsurprisingly, devastated for a year and more. And unemployment skyrocketed in many countries, with ILO estimating that 8.8 percent of all working hours were lost in 2020, equivalent to 255 million fulltime jobs lost in one year. Children were also deeply affected with UNICEF reporting that earlier this year that more than 616 million students still remain affected by full or partial school closures. COVID-19 also deepened gender inequality as women workers have been disproportionately affected by job losses and gender-based violence increased during the pandemic in most countries. The pandemic and the responses have disrupted livelihoods and created food insecurity, with 150 million people more going hungry than before the outbreak of the pandemic.

As COVID-19 has shown, the primary impacts of pandemics and other health crises, can lead to a range of significant secondary impacts in the health, social, economic, and political areas, all of which are interlinked and require common national economic policies. While these secondary impacts can be further reaching and longer lasting than primary impacts, developing countries often lack the capacity to respond when a crisis hits. It is obvious that the world was not prepared for COVID-19. Therefore, it is essential to find ways that help prepare us for the next global health crisis.

One way to prepare to do that is to invest in the much better usage of modelling of precisely these complex and inter-connected secondary impacts. A just-released investigation by UNDP into such modelling, suggests that this could provide policymakers with the necessary information and tools to mitigate projected losses and equip their countries with much better preparedness, across a range of economic and social sectors.

For example, such models developed before the COVID-19 pandemic calculated that a mild pandemic scenario could cost the world 1.4 million lives and close to 0.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) with some $330 billion in lost economic output, while in the extreme scenario, a massive global economic slowdown would occur, with over 142.2 million people killed and a GDP loss of $4.4 trillion.

Secondary impact modelling can provide the raw intelligence and analytical tools that countries need to develop a whole range of policy decisions for future outbreaks:

  • How investment in epidemic prevention and preparation of health systems can be made cost-effective compared to other government priorities?
  • What costs are likely to be incurred in a pandemic to help design disaster and risk finance strategies and risk transfer mechanisms?
  • Which households are most likely to be impacted and what specific needs will likely arise in different epidemic conditions in order to design targeted and timely humanitarian assistance?
  • Which sectors are most likely to be affected by different types of epidemic outbreaks to formulate policies on targeted stimulus spending in key affected sector?

In answering policy questions, countries can use secondary impact modelling to do a range of critical things in the event of an outbreak. They can review their social protection policies to minimize the spread of infection and their employment policies to support households and businesses during an epidemic, especially the most vulnerable. They can examine the long-term impacts of pandemics on social and development outcomes in order to formulate investment strategies for development priorities. And at the same time, countries can consider how to integrate such endeavors into their existing work in combatting climate change. And much, much more.

Nevertheless, this is, as the report notes, complex work with methodological challenges to overcome including availability, comparability and granularity of data across sectors and how to analysis such complex interlocking processes together.

For UNDP's Insurance and Risk Finance Facility and its partners, both countries and the insurance industry, this represents an opportunity to build the present and future resilience of countries and communities, by bringing the expertise of industry in the modelling and analysis of risk into the heart of government decision-making. UNDP is already working to integrate industry expertise on the modelling and analysis of climate driven hazards, into the way in which countries finance development. This could be a foundation for practically integrating the modelling of secondary impacts of health crises into decision-making, leading to more resilient communities and countries

We do not know when the world will be struck by another pandemic. But we do know we need to be much better prepared in order to safeguard development gains and build long-term resilience.