The COVID-19 pandemic and the future of public health

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic provides us with a rare opportunity to deeply examine the validity of the construction of modern medicine, which is armed by science, and focus more on technologies than on people’s values and more on new ideas than on conventional wisdom. The world’s responses to the COVID-19 emergency have revealed a badly weakened public health system – one of the three pillars of medicine, the other two being basic medicine and clinical medicine. A 100 years ago, public health was the only effective measure for combating infectious diseases, which were then the main cause of human death. It is still a decisive weapon against COVID-19 and other communicable diseases alike, but was barely recognized and trusted at the beginning of the pandemic by the general public and even some international strategists. However, the epidemic has been effectively contained in China by non-pharmacological public health measures, which saved valuable time for the development of vaccines in the country and probably hundreds of thousands of lives as well. Public health aims to improve the health of the entire population by using societal methods. It is not simply a medical issue, and building a strong public health system requires broad participation from various sections of society.