Covid-19: accelerating recovery

Abstract

Covid-19 infections and related illness and death are rightly at the forefront of our minds. It is critical that we consider how to reduce infections, treat those who are ill and protect health systems. We must, however, also consider how the pandemic is affecting the families of those infected, and how interventions to prevent the spread of the virus come with large negative economic and social consequences. We must begin to identify the ways in which we can soften these blows and recover from the negative consequences over the medium and long-term. We highlight here the importance of moving away the tendency to search for interventions to improve one outcome at a time. It will be essential, particularly in highly resource constrained settings, to look for accelerators, interventions which improve multiple outcomes simultaneously. We discuss how this will be especially important for groups who are at particular risk at this time, including of long-term negative outcomes. These include very young children, adolescents and those who have limited capacity to benefit from narrow interventions given critical needs in multiple domains. Searching for accelerators requires that we take a step back and look to identify common causes of negative outcomes and consider how we might address them. For many countries, recovery from this epidemic will be highly constrained by the limited availability of financial resources. Wise investments will be especially important at this time.