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. 2020 Jul;50(3):264-270.
doi: 10.1177/0020731420928971.

Early Warnings: The Lessons of COVID-19 for Public Health Climate Preparedness

Mary C Sheehan  1 , Mary A Fox  1
Affiliations

Early Warnings: The Lessons of COVID-19 for Public Health Climate Preparedness

Mary C Sheehan et al. Int J Health Serv. 2020 Jul.

Abstract

The early 2020 response to COVID-19 revealed major gaps in public health systems around the world as many were overwhelmed by a quickly-spreading new coronavirus. While the critical task at hand is turning the tide on COVID-19, this pandemic serves as a clarion call to governments and citizens alike to ensure public health systems are better prepared to meet the emergencies of the future, many of which will be climate-related. Learning from the successes as well as the failures of the pandemic response provides some guidance. We apply several recommendations of a recent World Health Organization Policy Brief on COVID-19 response to 5 key areas of public health systems - governance, information, services, determinants, and capacity - to suggest early lessons from the coronavirus pandemic for climate change preparedness. COVID-19 has demonstrated how essential public health is to well-functioning human societies and how high the economic cost of an unprepared health system can be. This pandemic provides valuable early warnings, with lessons for building public health resilience.

Keywords: COVID-19; climate change; public health.

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References

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