Why Do We Need It?
COVID-19 and previous health crises have wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of people, as well as our health systems and economies. Their impact has been seismic, with the worst repercussions affecting the poorest and most deprived sections of society.
Mitigating current and future pandemics
We need to take action now, to improve our responses and strategies to ensure that we are better prepared to mitigate current pandemics like antimicrobial resistance and for the next time a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 becomes a threat to human health.
Together, we can better identify, respond to and recover from future health emergencies.
The Trinity Challenge is action-oriented, and all efforts are directed towards generating new insights and solutions to safeguard the health of populations worldwide.
We are committed to supporting the Sustainable Development Goals agenda, which includes the WHO’s target of protecting 1 billion more people from health crises, and strengthening imperilled health systems.
The potential rewards of better, more collaborative thinking are huge.
What if, in future, the investments and infrastructure were in place to identify an emerging or re-emerging infectious disease threat before it became an outbreak or epidemic? What if researchers came to understand how to initiate a social and economic recovery from health crises in a way that did not exacerbate inequalities?
For example, new forms of community surveillance for antimicrobial resistance could be developed. Imagine if we had a sewage surveillance system that not only monitors for COVID-19, but also for potentially harmful pathogens before a large-scale outbreak happens. Or if we had real-time imaging reports that could track deviations from usual traffic patterns around health care facilities.
Currently, there are insufficient systems in place to give the right people the right access to the right data at the right time. We are ineffective in combining insights gained across data sources and sectors to support the identification of, response to, and recovery from health emergencies.
Among the first efforts of The Trinity Challenge to address this deficiency was a call to action for better usage of data: Please find the article for download here.
What if we’d started taking action on this five years ago?
Could we have prevented this COVID-19? We don’t know. But we want to ensure that we never have to ask ourselves this question again. It has taken a devastating pandemic to bring us all to the table, to talk, share, and collaborate.
We cannot afford to forget the lessons we have learnt in recent years, and the best way to demonstrate this is to develop responsive and effective preparedness strategies and systems today.