Talk:Pandemic predictions and preparations prior to the COVID-19 pandemic

First plan outline

As of now we are awaiting more sources, but we can go for :

• Long term / structural : ~ up to Autumn late 2019
  • International organisations
  • National : by continents and countries.
  • ...
• Immediate : weak signals and preparedness for arrival of the crisis, up to local health system and political leadership fully onboard.
  • ...

There may be later a "learning from covid crisis", etc too add. Plan will get improved. Yug (talk) 11:30, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Fixed northern-temperate-zone bias. :) Apart from that, the overall structure looks reasonable to me. Boud (talk) 14:48, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Lol. You flip my view upside down ! Yug (talk) 20:03, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Rename

Following the creation, it could be wise to think about a better name. Yug (talk) 12:46, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

No objections from me. But "preparedness" wouldn't sound good to me - there must be a simpler word that is reasonably neutral and encyclopedic. "Readiness" would be simpler, but doesn't sound right. Proposals are needed... Boud (talk) 14:50, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

Maybe we can find inspiration in WWII series, there is likely some article on pre-war build-up. Maybe something such as a simple 2019-2020 Coronavirus pandemic backgound ? Nothing elegant in my mind as of now. Yug (talk) 20:06, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

I suggest Planning and preparing for pandemics. It could be limited by dates, such as "... in 2000-2019", but Wikipedia has no other general article on planning and preparing in other decades, so this article might as well be open to all periods, until it gets big enough to split. Numbersinstitute (talk) 01:40, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Sources

If you bumped into an interesting sources but can't integrate it now, please drop it below.

Generalities

• 04-11: How prepping for pandemics can lead to big economic returns https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/11/opinions/prevent-pandemic-economically-opinion-ruger/index.html
• (opinion) The US was ranked as best prepared for pandemics in 2019. What happened? https://amp.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3079289/us-topped-2019-pandemic-preparedness-index-so-why-wasnt-it-ready
• 04-12: (fr) 'The European Commission asked states 63 times to reduce their health spending', complains the euro-MP Martin Schirdewan https://www.les-crises.fr/la-commission-europeenne-a-demande-63-fois-aux-etats-de-reduire-les-depenses-de-sante-denonce-l-eurodepute-martin-schirdewan/ |archiveurl= https://archive.today/Xanuo
• 03-25: (fr) Coronavirus : « On aurait pu sans doute avoir un vaccin et / ou des traitements prêts… » https://npa2009.org/arguments/sante/coronavirus-aurait-pu-sans-doute-avoir-un-vaccin-et-ou-des-traitements-prets - a vaccine could easily have been ready on time
• WHO/WB: hospital beds per 1000 people dropped non-stop in France from 1980 to 2013 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?locations=FR&view=chart - should be equivalent for most countries

Uncategorized

• Three Months, Two Continents and Four Stints in Quarantine https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/world/asia/coronavirus-quarantine.html

UK

• 05-31: How a decade of privatisation and cuts exposed England to coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/how-a-decade-of-privatisation-and-cuts-exposed-england-to-coronavirus

US 2020 delay

• 04:11 : President Trump Had Plenty Warnings And Still Ignored The Coronavirus | Op-Ed | NowThis https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gpX_isSrXhE
• 04-11: He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html |archiveurl=https://archive.today/sx4C5
  • summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-response-takeaways.html
• 'It will disappear': the disinformation Trump spread about the coronavirus – timeline https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/14/trump-coronavirus-alerts-disinformation-timeline
• Lipton, Eric; Goodnough, Abby; Shear, Michael D.; Twohey, Megan; Mandavilli, Apoorva; Fink, Sheri; Walker, Mark (2020-06-03). "The C.D.C. Waited 'Its Entire Existence for This Moment.' What Went Wrong?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-06-03.

Comments

Boud, this "He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus" is ... woow. 30mins read... but, wooow. Bold are sources with woow effect. Shocking chaos, shocking costs for us all. Yug (talk) 20:02, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Nice job by the NYT and nice finds by you. Unfortunately, I'm not wowed, I find this unsurprising. This is quite likely to qualify as a crime against humanity if any citizens of countries party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and living in the US die from COVID-19 (which is almost certain), and assuming that their families/support groups find that criminal court cases against Trump are blocked in the US. Politicians in some countries may have sufficient legal defences in terms of "didn't know and did the best given the knowledge available", but the quality of evidence is likely to be far more solid this time than in many similar cases. Boud (talk) 21:08, 11 April 2020 (UTC)Ά

The king has no clothes. The first world power top circle is lead like a familial monarchy's marketimg department and NYT pretends "choices were made". All this is surreal. Yug (talk) 05:00, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to classify between wow and non-wow :), I put the 63 times (from 2011 to 2018) "please reduce your health spending" as bold. SARS 2003-2004; H1N1/09 2009; MERS ongoing - "but we didn't know". Anyway, I added the ref to the list. Boud (talk) 19:59, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Overlaps

Daniel Mietchen usefully pointed out several existing Wikipedia pages with some degree of overlap:

• a brief article on Preparedness, which to me seems to be US jargon for wikt:preparations (wikt:preparedness does not have usage examples or age, but preparedness sounds jargony to me); I don't see any point having the article with such a broad topic name, since it's really only about preparations for emergency situations, not for your first job interview, asking someone for a date, making dinner, or other forms of preparations;
• Emergency management#Phases and personal activities has some prevention/preparations sections;
• Pandemic prevention has the wider context, of which this article should refer to for wider pandemic prevention/preparations;
• and there's a bunch of US-centric Wikipedia articles.

These all look useful for integrating together, thanks! Boud (talk) 19:48, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia enters the mystic scene?

The opening sentence is nonsense

Event A prior to Event B was the Event A carried out in the early twenty-first century prior to Event B.

The second sentence relates to a general topic, a pandemic. The WHO Global Preparedness Monitoring Board is emphasized. The third sentence introduce the term 'Disease X', also in reference to WHO. The fourth sentence shift the focus, to emphasize specifically France and USA to have hamstered resources relevant for epidemic preparedness.

I have to say, it is not neccesary to review the article to understand the absurdity of the article topic. SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 did not exist prior to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, and therefore there could not have been any predictions and preparations.

[edit: Propositions]
(1) You could move the page to Pandemic predictions and preparations for Disease X
(2) but I think the sensible thing would be to merge the article with Pandemic prevention.
It is a fair guess that Disease X is still waiting, out there Sechinsic (talk) 21:04, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Feel free to improve the wording of the lead, and/or propose a better title. There are many sources claiming that the lack of pandemic preparations during the early XXIst century was a major factor in the massive number of deaths and lack of containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. See the second paragraph of the lead: According to Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the United Kingdom "failed to act upon the lessons" of the SARS outbreak. Horton described the "global response to SARS-CoV-2 [as] the greatest science policy failure in a generation".[5].

@Yug: may wish to comment. I don't think that Greatest science policy failure in a generation would achieve consensus as a title for this article, because the lack of responses to human-induced global warming has plenty of scientific sources supporting it as a greater failure in science policy, and because the phrase is not so well-known as to be the most common title for the topic. Second greatest science policy failure in a generation would probably be accurate; but again, consensus for using it as a title would be very unlikely. Merging with Pandemic prevention wouldn't make sense: this article is mainly focussed on the predictions and preparations in the few decades that give context to the COVID-19 pandemic and that are linked by sources to the COVID-19 pandemic. Boud (talk) 23:27, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

"Predictions" is a very clumsy and misleading word, I'am uncomfortable using it in the title. I edited the intro to focus on preparation. "Predictions" made by relevant parties are simply discussions on how to prepare, and should therefore not have a dedicated word in the title. We don't have "2008 economic crisis and discussion around it".

Sechinsic made 2 proposals: 1) Pandemic predictions and preparations for Disease X , and 2) merge into Pandemic prevention. I think both are not enough.

• In THIS CURRENT ARTICLE, I assume we indeed want to cover the preparation which lead to the early 2020 mispreparation mess when COVID-19 pandemic first landed. What in this crisis was prepared, which weak structural point was maintained and later failed, etc. We do have a growing set of well researched sources showing up on these matters, reviewing how politicians reduced costs, health infrastructures, and slow pandemic decision making which then have been critically missing to avoid the respectives local 2020 failures.
• The term « Disease X » seems to simply be a place holder for next (currently unknown) pandemic. Similar to saying « next year ». And in our article's context, that pandemic now has a name and this name is COVID-19.
• Pandemic prevention should be more about the best recommendations, institutions set up, generalities for all type of epidemics, ... BEFORE any pandemic burst. WHO, Europe, USA, etc all have detailled yet generic pandemic preparedness guidelines to document.

This is the direction I see for this set of articles. cc:Boud. PS: Sechinsic, in the wiki spirit, I added numerotations to your 2 proposals to ease the dicussion. My apologize for that. Yug (talk) 14:00, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Hmm.. In the wikispirit you should never edit talk page contributions. But I see your point, and my post was very vague. It is only through your responses that it can appear constructive.

I'm not well into the matter of estimating and assesing what is a failure in the still ongoing, as well as recent health care crisis. But I'll strongly warn against finding a rhetoric platform - that is, explicitly, the article topic (THE article topic). As @Yug describe, your content is particular to the general subject 'Pandemic prevention'. But this particularity is actually a wideranging subject, and it could be a help to start this theme description as a subsection, in an article context that already focus the research subject.

Jumping around between regional perspectives, potential politic overtones, the deep science, around laboratory confirmation and vaccine and test research and so many issues at the clinical frontline, easily corrupt any comprehensive overview.

PS. I can't help reading Yug's observation "to cover the preparation which led to the early 2020 mispreparation mess" with sympathy as well as with some distance. The pandemic is a real big phenomenon, multi-facetted beyond trivial comprehension. To conjecture a scenario of 'full preparedness' is as illusive as the idea of mispreparedness. It is too easy to launch a rhetoric platform with vague content. I hope you can use my comment Sechinsic (talk) 17:40, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

@Yug and Sechinsic: Following Yug's three bullet points, the question of whether or not "COVID-19 is Disease X" is a minor issue; if some academics or institutions like WHO decide that "COVID-19 is not Disease X", that won't change much about the preparations, lack of preparations, and dismantling of existing preparations, in the two decades leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first and third points are the main ones: the role of this article is much more specific than pandemic prevention in general. So the question is to seek a better title. Suggestions which follow our general reasoning:

1. Pandemic prevention in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic
2. Pandemic prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic
3. Prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic
4. Pandemic prevention (2000–2019)
5. Pandemic preparations prior to the COVID-19 pandemic
6. Pandemic preparations in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic
7. Pandemic preparations (2000–2019)

3 would sound ridiculous, because the pandemic was not prevented;

2 sounds odd and almost as bad as 3;

1 risks including pandemic prevention during/after Jan/Feb 2020 - which gets back to the reason why I proposed putting prior to in the title;

5 would be the same as what we have now, without predictions and;

6 would again be ambiguous, allowing during/after Jan/Feb 2020.

The options without counterarguments seem to me to be 4, 5, 7. (PS: Regarding the editing of talk page contributions, it's not an absolute rule; for example, I just inserted a missing '>' symbol above, since the syntax error made automatic html indenting difficult). Are there any objections to any of 4, 5 or 7? (We're a small enough group that informal methods to converge on a title may be sufficient.) Boud (talk) 21:19, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

The Pandemic prevention article covers "measures to reduce causes of new infectious diseases and measures to prevent outbreaks and epidemics from becoming pandemics. It is not to be mistaken for pandemic preparedness or pandemic mitigation which largely seek to mitigate the magnitude of negative effects of pandemics". That's a fairly technical article about surveillance and stopping new diseases. The value of keeping this article separate is to focus on national and international backup plans for minimizing harm from pandemics which do happen.

• Best not to use the word prevention here, to avoid conflict with the Pandemic prevention article.
• I'd prefer not to have COVID-19 in the title, since these preparations applied to any other pandemic which has or will happen. (2000-2019) is far more neutral.
• I prefer not having a time restriction at all. There is no other Wikipedia article on preparations in other decades, so this is a natural place to include preparations in any other decade, until the article becomes large enough to split.
• To avoid using a noun as an adjective, I prefer 8. Planning and preparing for pandemics
• Or 9. Preparing for pandemics Is there a difference between planning and preparing in this context?
• Still, I'd support 10. Pandemic preparations without a date, if that's what the group wants. Numbersinstitute (talk) 01:44, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

@Numbersinstitute, Sechinsic, and Yug: Sorry, but focus on national and international backup plans for minimizing harm from pandemics which do happen is getting away from the point: this is a topic concerning the context of the COVID-19 pandemic - one of the major historical events of the XXIst century. According to the sources already in the article, there were proposals and attempts to prevent a pandemic such as the COVID-19 pandemic, not just mitigate the effects, for obvious moral, practical reasons and also because of international law. So no, this article is not just about minimising harm. The knowledge was available. Under international criminal law, politicians and administrators in those countries that have not reserved their legal right to carry out genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes could, in principle, be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court on the basis of having ignored the available information and favoured economic austerity policies rather than genocide prevention. See Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court for the list of countries who have reserved the right to carry out genocide (this includes the USA, Russia, China, India). Please do not suggest that this is "vague" or a question of "a rhetoric platform". Huge numbers of people have worked for over a century to carefully construct international law and build institutions that make it internationally illegal to carry out genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. SARS-CoV-2 is highly contagious and mostly lethal for a "specific group" (people over 80; people with comorbidity conditions). I don't know if Article 7 of the Rome Statute - Article 7: Crimes against humanity 1. For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack ... (k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health. applies to this situation or not; a key element is intent - did the individual leaders of corporations, consultancy firms, lobbying groups, political parties, governments have [Intention (criminal law)|intent]] to kill off "a civilian population"? For our article, that will depend on what the sources say. For the moment, there are only national-level cases under national-level criminal law such as "negligence" or "failing to help a person in danger", and these are presently only listed at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_COVID-19/Archive_7#Legal_cases_against_governmental_authorities_and_punishment_of_those_opening_legal_cases as a possible separate article. This article is not about the legal cases, it's about the evidence, in an encyclopedic sense, not a legal sense.

So 8, 9 and 10 are too wide in terms of period. Nothing stops having a bit of background from earlier epochs in this article, but there's more motivation for putting in the context for this particular pandemic and the particular 2000-2019 pair of decades that led up to it.

I don't see the problem with the word prevention for this particular context and epoch. It happened to be "failed prevention", but there were clearly attempts at prevention. So I would still go for 4, 5 or 7. Boud (talk) 14:37, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

@Boud, Sechinsic, and Yug: Yes, prevention is a very important topic. It already has an article, Pandemic prevention, so prevention and lack pf prevention can be discussed there. This article needs to have a different purpose. Numbersinstitute (talk) 17:22, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

Italy: TODO

A couple of links for an Italy section:

• 11 Dec 2020 Guardian; 13 Aug 2020 Guardian
  • The Guardian reports include info on legal actions against Italian authorities for "possible criminal negligence".
• "An Unprecedented Challenge: Italy’s First Response to Covid-19" - archive of 13 May 2020 WHO report hosted at dors.it
  • Guardian The 102-page report said Italy's pandemic plan had not been updated since 2006 and that, due to being unprepared, the initial response from hospitals was "improvised, chaotic and creative". - this seems to refer to page 2 (pdf page 10), near the top, which effectively says that the plan was established in 2006 and nothing concrete happened since then; and page 20 (pdf page 28), Unprepared for such a flood of severely ill patients, the initial reaction of the hospitals was improvised, chaotic and creative. It took some time before formal guidance became available. The fact that Guerra was paranoid about upsetting Italian authorities and removed the pdf from the WHO website is of only minor relevance to this Wikipedia article; what's relevant is the poor quality of preparations in one of the richest and scientifically well equipped parts of the world.

The Streisand effect once again brings to light useful information. Boud (talk) 16:06, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Start here for archives related to the Guardian's statement A "Flu pandemic plan" published on the Italian health ministry's website shows it was last updated on 15 December 2016. However, the document's properties on Abode Acrobat Reader show it was created in January 2006.. Tech comment: there's absolutely no need to use Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the properties of a pdf file; pdfinfo file.pdf is a fast simple method (pdfinfo is in the package poppler-utils). Boud (talk) 16:20, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Page rename

Suggest renaming to COVID-19 pandemic preparedness or COVID-19 pandemic preparedness and response as per WP:COMMON name. CutePeach (talk) 13:07, 18 October 2021 (UTC)