Executive Summary
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report, one of the top five global risks today – in terms of potential impact - is the spread of infectious diseases. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa dramatically raised awareness of the global burden of infectious disease and raised questions about the preparedness of public health systems. Disease and epidemics have always been part of our world. Today we tackle approximately 700 occurrences of epidemics a year, affecting millions of people. The good news is that our healthcare systems are also advancing rapidly and we are continually getting better at prevention and treatment of diseases. However, what is -relatively- new today is the globalization of these epidemics, their ability to rapidly spread. A plague outbreak in a local community in India today is not an obscure local event. It can quickly become a globalized event. Global pandemics have become a real threat, and have changed the risk equation. This equation is now on the mind of the public health community, the biology community, the national security community, and the global business community.
The need for better pandemic preparedness and response was expressed by global leaders during the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos (January 2015). A coalition led by the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and private sector companies including UPS, Henry Schein and Becton Dickens have developed a framework to establish better coordination across all sectors in order to improve the global response to future health crises. The coalition is called the Global Supply Network for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. This initiative contemplates an end-to-end supply chain network capability that allows humanitarian and governmental responders multiple levels of collaboration, access and visibility.
While most governments around the world have some plans for tackling outbreaks, this is not an area government can singularly manage. The number of stakeholders that need to be involved makes the matter fairly complex: local governments, federal governments – where they exist –, local NGO’s, international organizations, private sector companies, and – most importantly - the local community. By any standard, this is a complex and unpredictable system. In this complex system, we are still missing various crucial elements of “readiness” to respond. The main ones include supply-chain management, standardization, information and data management, human resource planning, community mobilization, and funding.
All these challenges become even more complex when facing a pandemic in a “global city”: a city with extensive global air, sea, and land connections like London, Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, or Dubai. While there have been thousands of deaths linked to Ebola in 2014, it could have been worse. One of the reasons that it did not spread more rapidly was the nature of the virus itself (it is not airborne) and the simple luck in that it did not reach any urban population centers. Should the virus have taken hold in Lagos or Monrovia, the morbidity and mortality figures would likely exploded.
Dubai today has one of the world’s most transient populations with over 75 million air passengers flying through the Dubai International Airport in 2015. Stakeholders participating in our roundtable discussion agreed that Dubai can be a leader in developing and adopting appropriate measures and protocols to prevent the spread of the contamination in case of an outbreak (pandemic preparedness). There are three main levels to such a blueprint:
City Protection: preparedness to respond to a disease outbreak within the city. Protecting lives and livelihoods of Dubai’ citizens through effective treatment and management.
Global Containment: Dubai not only needs to have a plan to rapidly contain any outbreak and ensure it limits the spread via its ports, but also that core operations remain viable.
Global Response: as an air and sea logistics hub must also have a strategy to facilitate the transport and consolidation of supply cargos (also considering prepositioning in certain cases). As the home of the International Humanitarian City, Dubai’s role is even more strategic and crucial to the effort.