The world is ill-prepared to prevent another pandemic

While the world’s overall readiness score on the 2021 Global Health Security Index is not particularly good, it is noticeably worse in the prevention category, according to Statista.

The global average score for preventing the emergence or release of pathogens is only 28.4 out of 100, as 113 countries show “little or no attention” to zoonotic diseases, that is, diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans, such as COVID-19 according to current knowledge.

As the graph below shows, other categories also score well below the high of 100, with only one of the six pillars of health security achieving a global average score above 50.

It is worrying that they are the early stages of an epidemic, a pandemic where the world seems particularly vulnerable. With a global average prevention score of 28.4 out of 100 and a score of 32.3 in early detection and reporting, the world seems dangerously ill-prepared to stop a future epidemic before it becomes a pandemic.