Day 59, Quasi-Quarantine: Dissecting The Lessons (Not Learned) From Ebola

I recently completed Lessons from Ebola (PH557x), a free, month-long course through Harvard's virtual learning program, HarvardX. Filmed in 2015, the class set out to discuss that year's Ebola outbreak in West Africa, centered on the countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea -- all war-torn nations without the health infrastructure needed to address a pandemic.

The course was led by Ashish Jha, who is now the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, in addition to the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health and the Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. He conducted a series of interviews to cover the Ebola outbreak from a number of different perspectives and angles, including intervention, care, compliance, accountability, and politics.

Jha interviewed the biggest experts in the field: Paul Farmer, Allen Brandt, Peter Piot, and Chelsea Clinton, among others. They discussed the Ebola response on the local, regional, national, and international levels, and why Ebola is considered "the caregiver's disease." They dug into why the WHO was so late in declaring a global health emergency and why there was such a lack of faith in the Director General, Margaret Chan. The team took a look at why global lessons from SARS, H1N1, and HIV/AIDS were only partially applied, and why pessimism in the idea that would change in the next 5 years was so pervasive.

Expert after expert emphasized that, contrary to what you may hear, Ebola and other pandemics are not perfect storms -- they are accidents waiting to happen. Jha cited his colleague Julio Frank, who pointed out that the longest flight between any two places in the world is now shorter than the incubation period of every known human pathogen.

In summing up, Jha reiterated that, due to globalization, what happens in Delhi or Monrovia has an effect in Tokyo, Melbourne, and Cambridge. He noted that, while the the tools exist to strengthen health systems and create a global governance structure, until we care about the health of every person in the world, our efforts will be unsuccessful. Whether you choose to look at it through a global health security (to protect our area, we must improve health everywhere) agenda or a global health solidarity (we're all one people on one planet) lens, we are falling short on all levels and will continue to incur fatal lessons until we create the engagement needed to dramatically invest in global health infrastructure.

Me being me and all, I took 50 pages of notes. I'm not a burgeoning epidemiologist, but with COVID-19 hanging over all of us, I was interested in learning clues about what has gone wrong in the past and why our nation's response has been so bumbling, illogical, and ignorant. I mean, I think I had some significant clues as to why before taking this class, but I'm grateful that I now have the foundation of what has happened in the past, why we are so impacted in the present -- and what we will no doubt face again in the future.