World Medical & Health Policy最新文献

Developing and strengthening systems for information sharing as well as detecting and addressing dis/misinformation can not only protect capacity for public health emergency preparedness and response, but potentially increase overall community resilience and social capital. More actively involving citizens in the government's collection and sharing of information can generate more public buy-in so people will be more invested in making certain that such information is not arbitrarily dismissed or drowned out by conspiracy theories. Such an approach may have the added the benefit of creating stronger collaborative connections between government, individual citizens, and civic organizations to promote overall resilience. More community involvement in terms of the collection and dissemination of information can provide value in terms of preparation for a public health emergency by bolstering surveillance efforts to detect a threat early on. Getting the public more integrated into the public health information system can also be valuable in terms of diminishing the threat of mis/disinformation. Building up relationships between the public and the public health sector can advance the mission of improving community resilience through education, engagement, and collaboration. In this review, we will examine existing evidence for this approach and will then conclude with possible new approaches.

In March 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. Given the novelty of the virus, and hence, lack of official guidance on effective containment strategies, individual countries opted for different containment approaches ranging from herd immunity to strict lockdown. The opposing strategies followed by the United Kingdom and its former colony, Malaysia, stand exemplary for this. Real-time polymerase chain reaction was implemented for testing in both counties. Malaysia acted with strict quarantining rules and infection surveillance. The United Kingdom followed an initially lenient, herd-immunity approach with strict lockdown only enforced weeks later. Although based on the same health-care structure historically, Malaysia developed a more unified health system compared with the United Kingdom. We suggest that this more centralized structure could be one possible explanation for why Malaysia was able to react in a more timely and efficient manner, despite its closer geographic proximity to China. We further explore how the differences in testing and quarantining strategy, as well as political situation and societal compliance could account for the discrepancy in the United Kingdom's versus Malaysia's relative success of COVID-19 containment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not spared the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region. MENA is one of the most politically, socially, and economically heterogeneous regions in the world, a characteristic reflected in its governments' responses to COVID-19. About two-thirds of these governments issued coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders (SAHOs), one of the most effective tools public health officials have for slowing the spread of infectious diseases. While SAHOs are very effective in terms of countering infectious diseases, they are extremely disruptive in nonhealth domains. The objective of this study is to identify reliable factors related to health care policy making that shaped the decisions of MENA governments to issue a SAHO or not in response to COVID-19. The results identify specific political, social, and medical factors that played important roles and provide a look at early government responses to a global health crisis in a heterogeneous region of the world.