Pandemic Preparedness Worse Now Than Pre-COVID, Health Minister Warns

The loss of experienced health staff and public servants following COVID-19 means Australia is less able to face a pandemic now than it was then.

Australian Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler speaks at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on July 28, 2022. Martin Ollman/Getty Images

An extensive 877-page report scrutinising Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been released, revealing critical shortcomings that led to unnecessary loss of life and economic damage.

The inquiry found that restrictions, along with widespread miscommunication, and a lack of compassion, eroded trust in the government.

The report by epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett, senior public servant Robin Crack, and economist Angela Jackson includes nine guiding recommendations and “26 actions for change.”

Health Minister Mark Butler admits that “like most countries,” Australia’s pandemic plans were “grossly inadequate for the scale of the challenge that COVID-19 presented.”

He pointed out that the plans failed to address critical areas such as the international border closures, quarantine measures, and workforce demands, which were vital to the response.

“Leaders were placed in the invidious position, of having to build the plane while it was flying,” he noted.

The report does not seek to blame any failings on people trying to act in what they believed was the country’s best interests.

However, Butler says it contains a trove of information and recommendations that will allow Australia to do better in the future.

He warns that the nation’s current preparedness is worse than before COVID because health staff and experienced government personnel—who had all learned a lot through the pandemic—were exhausted by the experience and have left the public service.

The minister has already committed to creating a Centre for Disease Control as a central point of information and coordination in future public health emergencies.

“The first priority of the CDC will be to establish a comprehensive joined-up data and surveillance system in partnership with states and territories,” Butler said.

Part of its role would be to provide a “single, comprehensive real-time data and surveillance system [which would be] be world-leading, including our use of wastewater surveillance, which we know has been so important.”

“The CDC will also be responsible for providing independent, evidence-based advice about, particularly, a pandemic response, but more generally, our responses to communicable diseases,” he said.

Butler blames the lack of real-time data and evidence-based policy, along with what he admits was a lack of transparency, as being responsible for “a large decline in trust, which the panel members say ... means that many of the measures taken during COVID-19 are unlikely to be accepted by the population again.”

In several places, the report criticises those measures, such as border closures, stating they “lacked clear rationale and caused significant harm.”

Decades Of Underfunding: Public Health Association

Meanwhile, the Public Health Association of Australia attributes these failures to decades of underfunding in public health.

Its CEO, Terry Slevin, stated, “The simple truth is there’s been a disinvestment in public health over decades in Australia and largely because it’s not so much in your face.”

“The constant demand for investment in more hospitals, more emergency rooms, and the like [for] dealing with existing disease has absolutely absorbed health investment.

“The insurance policy—as Dan Andrews referred to it—for investing in public health wasn’t seen as a good investment by too many governments. The pandemic showed that maybe it would have been a good policy to take out.”

While agreeing that having the CDC will help, Slevin says it will be burdened with huge expectations and will take considerable time to create.

“If it’s going to successfully protect the health of people in Australia, if it’s going to prepare our systems and our communities for future assaults, and if it’s going to tackle those chronic diseases that we know have the heaviest burden of disease, it needs that ongoing [certainty and] commitment. It needs to be independent,” he said.

Transparency the Key

Slevin emphasised the need for expertise, established systems, and mechanisms to capture necessary information.

“You need to have the connections, both internally and internationally, so that intelligence is shared at the right time with the right people in the right level of detail [and] certainty [about] the data that you’re working with.”

He recommends the CDC reports within 12 to 18 months after its creation and then biannually, which he says should help to rebuild trust.

“Transparency is key. Dealing with the pandemic traded a lot on trust, and some people have lost some of that trust,” he said.

“The government, the Centre for Disease Control, and the health community need to rebuild that. I hope the Australian Centre for Disease Control will be a key instrument to build that trust, by better communication based on the best available evidence, and taking into consideration all of the community who are affected by those decisions.”