Abstract
Our current predicament, the Covid-19 pandemic is first of all a health crisis. However, social disruption and economic damage are becoming visible some 7 months after the Wuhan City outbreak early December 2019. The authors wondered what could have been done better in prevention and repression of the Covid-19 pandemic from a safety management and risk control point of view.Within a case study framework, the authors gathered literature on pandemics, about country response effectiveness, and about human behaviour in the face of danger. The results consist of a safety management oriented narrative about the current pandemic, several critical observations about the current paradigms and shortcomings of preparation, and a number of opportunities for improvements of countermeasures. Many of the proverbial animals in the safety zoo, representing typical behaviours, were observed in action.Based on well proven risk analysis methods – risk management, event tree, scenarios, bowtie – the authors then analyse the generic sequence of events in a pandemic, starting from root causes, through prevention, via the outbreak of a pathogen, through mitigation to long term effects. Based on this analysis the authors propose an integrated pandemics barrier model. In this model the core is a generic pandemic scenario that is distinguishing five risk controllable sequential steps before an outbreak.The authors contend that the prevention of pandemics via safety management based biohazard risk control is both possible and of paramount importance since it can stop pandemic scenarios altogether even before an outbreak.
Highlights
People, thinking about safety, use quite a few animals as representations of safety concepts
It is built-up in line with the sequence of events unfolding in the current Covid-19 pandemic
Important trends contributing to pandemic risk are population-growth, more deforestation, more living in cities, 55% and in 2050 some 68%, and more travelling across the globe (WEF, 2019; Kain & Fowler, 2019)
Summary
People, thinking about safety, use quite a few animals as representations of safety concepts. Looking at the safety zoo, it would seem that dragons were suspected around the wild animal market but this danger was deemed unknown It were grey mouses in local governments that accepted their risks and paper tigers looking away. It turned out this was an error of judgement since the world became quickly aware of a contagious elephant in the doctors’ room presenting a great threat to the global population. The consequences of ineffective responses are exceptionally high death tolls These notions raise many questions by many people about what it takes to choose the right strategy for health, safety, vulnerable groups, critical functions, essential services and supplies, society and economy in relation to pandemic risk. From a safety management point of view the world is confronted with an unwanted event and huge adverse consequences: by June 10, 2020 the growing total death toll in over 190 countries passed 408,000 (WHO, 2020f) while societal disruption and global economic damage continue to develop
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