Photo: ©Eros Erika/123RF

By Frank Martin

The Covid-19 pandemic shocked the world by emerging without warning and no special health defenses.

The ambush of the virus took planetary economies by surprise and vulnerable.

A project that will be ready at the end of this year will fulfill the peculiar mission of driving away this risk.

The World Health Organization’s Center for Intelligence on Pandemics and Epidemics will soon be operating a new global alert system in hopes of avoiding such dire surprises.

The main piece of the system’s design will be a supercomputer that will help scientists “predict, prevent, detect, prepare for and respond to a new pandemic” that suddenly appears according to a WHO explanation.

The general director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus estimated that the almost sudden attack of COVID-19 “exposed loopholes in the intelligence systems of global epidemics and pandemics.”

He cited forecasts that estimates as natural the sudden viruses emerge with potential to cause epidemics or pandemics.

A powerful criterion is that viruses move fast. But data can move even faster, according to experts.

The global alert system in which Germany participates should be open in Berlin by the end of 2021.

Experts believe that such a “prognosis” will not only play a future role in the emergence of epidemiological situations, but may also help to close the current one, still on.

The center will aim to generate early knowledge about disease risk and vulnerability to take immediate action.

The Executive Director of WHO Health Emergencies Program, Dr. Michael Ryan emphasized that one of the results will be the exchange of information between nations to face future threats to public health.

Experts believes that “there are many problems to be solved, especially those related to transparency and accountability”, in terms of health care for humanity.

In Ryan opinion the new technologies cannot necessarily solve by its own these problems.

A proposal shared by many governments is that WHO play a central role as a global health institution in this goal.

The fundamental idea of ​​strengthening the fight against future pandemics is collected enough data to do that protection task well.

According to WHO data grouped and processed are a very powerful analytical tools with accurate and fast information.

Germany’s Federal Minister of Health, Jens Spahn, said that the WHO Center would act as a “global early warning surveillance system”.