The Role of Schools of Public Health in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been catastrophic for the health and livelihoods of people all over the planet. Over a year on, there is still no prospect of an ending to the pandemic. There is little evidence of coherent international commitment and consensus on a strategy to suppress viral transmission and chart a global route out of the pandemic. As I write, the world has recorded 115 million cases and 2.5 million deaths. The Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER) has been active in supporting our members’ work combatting the pandemic since early March 2020 [1]. Our active members in Portugal have contributed with major papers on the use of masks [2, 3], the limitations of testing [4–6], planning for a second wave [7], children’s masks [8], and the spread of the virus in meat plants [9]. These papers are among the output of the ASPHER COVID-19 task force [10] and have influenced the policy positions of national governments and international agencies such as the WHO Europe, the Global Network of Academic Public Health (GNAPH) [11], the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and other European health partners. National governments and public health leaders have been found unprepared and indecisive in many parts of the world. Public health systems and services have been cut back over many years prior to the pandemic and it will be one of our tasks to rebuild and attract new investment into training, research, and professional capacity building for the protection and improvement of the public’s health [1]. ASPHER is at the forefront of campaigning for these. Our paper on the erosion of public health has been published now [12] and our extensive report on the actions of schools of public health can be viewed on our website [13]. If anything should demonstrate the need for public health systems and services it is this pandemic. Many countries have lacked professional resources to respond to the outbreak. We have also been slow to document the harmful social and economic effects arising through the lockdowns which have been needed to control the virus [14]. We need public health resources, and policies, to tackle the inequalities in our societies, which make the pandemic deadlier to some groups and communities. Pandemic diseases of poverty, mass overconsumption, and addiction have also created a foundation upon which the virus can have a deadlier impact [14, 15]. The scientific community has struggled to gather the collective memory hidden in the literature of a bygone era to rediscover the lessons of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic [16]. For example, in the Western world we have had to relearn the use of masks for protection of the wider community [17]. We have also uncovered economic and social evidence from 1918 showing the effects of early and prolonged lockdowns to enable earlier economic recov-