Picture yourself at the gym. It might be confined, people are huffing and puffing, everyone is moving around. And that’s before you hit the showers and change room.
We may never know whether the pandemic began with a leak at the Wuhan lab. But even the possibility shows we need a universal biosafety code to prevent something similar happening in future.
When emergency alerts are hard to distinguish from text messages and when they announce the availability of vaccines rather than an impending tornado, are they still emergency alerts?
The failure of for-profit long-term care homes to protect residents during the pandemic is well-known. But non-profits also under-performed governments in preventing COVID-19 deaths.
The inefficient vaccine allocation rules currently in place must be replaced by new cooperative institutional structures and more concrete steps by the Group of Twenty (G20) countries.
Australia is still pursuing the origin of COVID-19, with Scott Morrison strongly supporting President Joe Biden’s efforts to get to the bottom of the outbreak.
The course offers a model for teaching about complex problems, and underlines the critical role of university learning, research and outreach in understanding and addressing them.
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand