This is perhaps the SDG most affected by the pandemic. Before Covid-19, a kind of progress had been made in this field. Proof of this is the almost worldwide increase in life expectancy. However, despite all the efforts and progress, the United Nations Development Programme states that, even before the crisis, the world was probably not going to be able to ensure health care for all by 2030. And things are getting worse. The coronavirus has turned all progress in this field upside down. Indeed, in all countries, but especially in those whose health systems were unstable and unequal, the pandemic has dramatically amplified the presence of such inequalities in access to health services.
The consequences of such a long-term pandemic as the one we are experiencing can be potentially serious for the health of the poorest populations and, above all, can mark a very deep gap precisely in the goals of the third SDG. The pandemic has intensify an inequitable distribution of health opportunities and well-being for all ages in many parts of the world.
Did you know that more than 60% of our diseases come from animals? For example, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Ebola fever, and the original HIV come from pathogens originated in wild or domestic animals.
After Covid-19 -a disease also originated from a pathogen in an animal - collapsed the entire Planet Earth, many researchers have focused on the study of zoonotic events. They have determined that disease transmission from animals to humans will continue because of the poor relationship we have with nature. Although rural, jungle and tropical locations are the most vulnerable to the emergence of infectious diseases for obvious reasons, we have seen how such diseases will travel across the globe.
On the other hand, the rapid spread of the coronavirus has put great pressure on hospitals and exposed the shortcomings of many of the medical systems in different countries and regions. This has happened not only in the less developed countries, which obviously already suffered from unequal and inefficient health systems, but also in many resourceful countries, where it has not been possible to provide adequate treatment and care to all patients.
In low-income countries there are only 0.3 doctors per 1000 people, which means it is very difficult to take care for all the sick people that need a treatment. During the pandemic, the few doctors that do exist in these places have been entirely devoted to the care of people with covid, so they were unable to care for the remaining patients with other diseases.
Hospital collapse has also led to problems of access to health care everywhere. According to available data, 23 million children worldwide have not been able to access their basic vaccins during the year 2022.
This is particularly relevant and dangerous, given that in many parts of the world certain diseases for which children are vaccinated are still being eradicated. That means that a population-wide interruption in vaccination campaigns for such diseases can bring back serious outbreaks affecting large numbers of people. And the worst thing is that these people can't be properly treated at hospitals because those hospitals have been over capacity for more than two years.
Another striking fact about an effect of the pandemic on less developed countries is that, according to the World Health Organisation, health expenses are pushing tens of millions of people into extreme poverty, because when a developing country is in transition to a higher income level, the first thing it usually does is to increase private health insurance fes. This always translates into higher financial risk for the inhabitants. Why?
Because when access to health care depends solely on a fee paid by individuals, medical costs are often very high, leading to most people being forced to avoid those fees so they can't access health services. This leads to further inequality and poverty, as those who pay such fees find their economic situation worsens. This is clearly not the way forward, and unfortunately it is the way most developing countries proceed. It only perpetuates a cycle of poverty and makes the right to access an efficient and equitable health care system impossible.
But it is no longer just hospital pressure what the pandemic has brought. It has probably happened to you that one of your routine medical check-ups has been postponed, cancelled or carried out by telephone. This has happened all over the world and the effect it is having is very worrying. Delays caused by logistical shortcomings are causing major setbacks in key SDG 3 targets, including child and maternal mortality rates, immunisation rates, TB incidence and HIV prevalence.
While Covid-19 has fortunately not caused a high number of child deaths, the problem is that many children are at high risk of death due to the indirect effects of the pandemic, including widespread disruptions in the provision and use of critical health care services.
What has happened around the world is that people have often delayed or avoided visiting health centres to avoid becoming infected. As a result, many women around the world have given birth at home in critical conditions over these years, have not received the necessary treatment in case of complications, have not gone for vaccinations for their children, and have not gone for routine health checks, where sometimes easily treatable diseases are discovered, but they can become serious if they are not treated in time, and all this has happened because of the fear of becoming infected.
The Lancet Global Health journal published in 2020 an article entitled "Early estimates of the indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal and child mortality in low-income and middle-income countries: a modelling study" in which the authors calculated that, each month, due to delays in health systems and failure to attend check-ups, between 42,000 and more than 190,000 additional deaths are recorded, depending on the severity of the impact of confinement.
In addition, many women have stopped breastfeeding their children for fear of infecting them, and lower levels of breastfeeding have resulted in more newborns with pneumonia and diarrhoea.
To combat the pandemic, safe and effective vaccines have been developed and approved at unprecedented speed, using new technologies. The scientific community has worked very hard, but the distribution of vaccines has been totally uneven, and therefore ineffective. The pandemic has not been brought under control due to the emergence of new strains from places with very low vaccination rates and very few hygienic and sanitary resources.
While many batches of vaccine expired in high-income countries, huge numbers of people around the world were still without their first dose. When it comes to a global pandemic, an individual response is utterly inefficient.
There is much work ahead in the post-pandemic period to achieve the targets proposed by SDG 3. It has already been shown that governments must avoid any cuts in public spending on health and other social services. It is important that they comply with the World Health Organisation's recommendation to allocate an additional 1% of GDP to primary health care. Different studies indicate that countries with better primary health care have better, more equitable and more efficient, health systems overall. Efficient primary health care could save 60 million lives and increase average life expectancy by 3.7 years by 2030, according to WHO estimations.
Another important task for countries is to create at least 10 million additional full-time jobs worldwide in the health sector. It has been shown during this pandemic that even countries with strong health systems have been ineffective when taking care to a huge number of sick people due to staff shortages. Employment in this sector needs to be boosted in order to be able to face new pandemics in better conditions.
Creating safe places to live is also essential. Eighty per cent of people living in poverty live in rural areas. This means that they do not have access to safe housing with minimum hygiene conditions, nor do they have access to basic sanitation. The lack of basic social services in some communities means that they are trapped in a spiral of disease and insecurity. Improving conditions in communities, neighbourhoods and homes translates into improvements for the whole planet.
In conclusion, the pandemic has set us back a long way in terms of health and wellbeing, especially in places with fewer resources, but it has also taught us lessons, it has taught us which is not the way forward, and how we should approach our health and social systems in order to move forward and meet the SDG 3 targets.
Filter by category
Filter by tag