A study published in BMJ Global Health in July 2023 by researchers from the Brown University School of Public Health, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) found that vast majority of countries that entered the COVID-19 pandemic…
The Global Health Security (GHS) Index, developed by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security with Economist Impact, was first launched in October 2019 followed by the second publication in December 2021. The Index measures 195 countries’ capacities to detect, respond to, and respond from…
While the 2021 Global Health Security Index reported that all countries remain dangerously vulnerable to future biological threats, it also showed marked improvements in preparedness in recent years for four nations. Released in December 2021, most recent version of the Index shows New Zealand, Lithuania, Chile, and Georgia improving their…
[The following article was published as an op-ed by Wilmot James in Business Day (South Africa) on March 16, 2022.] To keep and build on the levels of citizen confidence, governments must respond nimbly, sensibly and effectively in pandemic risk management. Trust matters in organising the activities, business and…
Two years after publication of the inaugural edition of the Global Health Security Index, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between excess mortality during the pandemic and national preparedness as defined by the index. To better inform the future iterations of the GHS Index,…
Report calls on national and global leaders to sustain and expand upon preparedness capacities developed to fight COVID-19 WASHINGTON, DC (December 8, 2021) — Despite important steps taken by countries to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, all countries—across all income levels—remain dangerously unprepared to meet future epidemic and pandemic threats,…
Although the GHS Index measures capacities and identifies preparedness gaps, it cannot predict how leaders will use national assets when a crisis occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that some of the countries identified by the 2019 GHS Index to have the greatest health security capacities, such as the United States…
Nearly two years after the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized COVID-19 as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, some lessons from the pandemic are clear: Countries’ ability to measure the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths depend on their having public health capacities such as diagnostic and screening tests,…
Global Catastrophic Biological Risks (GCBRs) refer to biological risks of unprecedented scale, with devastating outcomes that are orders of magnitude greater than what the world has witnessed with the COVID-19 pandemic. Such events could cause such significant and irreparable damage to human civilization that they undermine its long-term potential. Although…
The world will be assessing the factors that contributed to the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic for years to come. GHS Index team members took stock of the current information and thinking about what factors mattered most in responding to the virus as they developed the 2021 GHS Index framework,…