The COVID-19 pandemic, which thrust Australian health professionals into a wartime mindset, exposed weaknesses in the country’s ability to monitor the evolving crisis in real-time.
Health experts are warning authorities that they should learn from the data of the federal government’s previous pandemic response in order to effectively tackle inevitable future pandemics.
“We need to be very objective and analytical of where there were gaps,” Doherty Institute Director Sharon Lewin, who led a consortium to advise the government on COVID-19 modelling and scenario planning, said.
“In science, transparency is everything – you share your scientific work when it’s ready, you open it up for criticism, you debate the pros and cons.”
Director Lewin states that transparency and data are really important now that they are able to examine the government’s pandemic work as a community.
She also suggested that the biggest weakness Australia had through the COVID-19 pandemic was its data systems and inability to access and interpret information in real-time.
Information sharing is complicated in Australia due to state and territory government data ownership. That, along with the mixed public and private health system, crippled the nation’s pandemic response.
“Having general practice privatised, a fragmented hospital system – (there’s) a whole lot of reasons why we can’t access data in real-time,” Director Lewin said.
“That is one of the biggest things that we have to fix. It’s very important even now in understanding the deaths that are happening from COVID.”
She also notes that Australia still needs to invest in its capability to develop vaccines and therapeutics, host clinical trials, and manufacture treatments, and then turn its attention to how it works within the wider region and how vaccinations are distributed between rich and poor countries.
Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital’s infectious diseases clinician Krispin Hajkowicz points to a nimble, adaptive system as the most important element of a pandemic response.
“The biggest learning for me by far is that plans are not very useful,” Dr Hajkowicz said.
“What you need actually is a very responsive, reflexive system that can see where the problems are and shift (things) within a week or even a couple of days … as new variants emerge, new treatments come along, (and) new populations get infected. We need a warm base of ongoing work in pandemic viruses and viruses in general to make sure that we’re ready to go next time.”
Experts maintain they always knew Australia would get through the pandemic, with Director Lewin saying she thought of COVID-19 as wartime in the early days.
“My parents went through the second world war – they’re both European, and they’ve lived in hardship over the years,” she said.
“(I thought), ‘That’s what we’re going to experience through this, but we will get to the other side’.”
Dr Hajkowicz adds that while he thought Australia would get through COVID-19, it was more a question of how much misery and suffering people would endure in the meantime.
“We got through it with a lot of harm anyway and I think we were very worried about how much harm would be caused,” he said.
With AAP