WHO: Northern hemisphere’s contact tracing for Covid-19 an ‘abject failure’

Dr Michael Ryan says the world's more developed countries should learn from African and Asian nations' response

Dr Michael Ryan said greater trust needed to be developed with communities. AFP

The supposedly more developed northern hemisphere needs to learn better from African and Asian countries’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official said, as he condemned the abject failure of contact tracing.

Dr Michael Ryan, the director of the WHO’s emergencies programme, said the southern hemisphere had led the way in its response to the virus because of stronger community interventions, contact tracing, surveillance and controlling infections while engaging with communities.

The transfer of technology was no longer a binary movement from north to south, he told the virtual World Health Summit. “This is a four-point compass. Learning and knowledge moves in all directions,” he said, while also praising the work of Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, which works to combat health epidemics.

Dr Ryan was also deeply critical of the inability to get contact tracing working at an optimal level, meaning that many were walking around unaware they have contracted the virus.

“One of the abject failures in this pandemic response, to be quite frank, has been that central principle of contact tracing - the ability to detect and isolate cases, to quarantine contacts in a supportive way and, importantly, to have communities buy into that,” Dr Ryan said.

Dr Michael Ryan said greater trust needed to be developed with communities. AFP

Part of the issue, he said, was a lack of trust among people. In the UK there have been repeated issues with the track and trace system, as well as delays in its implementation.

“Trust is given by a community, it is not taken by the authorities. It is a gift from the community and it takes years to build that trust. You can’t build it overnight and you can break it in minutes or days,” he said.

“From that perspective, if we have trust then communities do accept things like contact tracing, they will accept things like supported quarantine, they will accept stay at home orders, but they will do that when they see public health authorities making ground and achieving success and delivering their economies and their social lives back to them.

“There has been a great breach in that trust.”

Dr Ryan said there needed to be a better understanding of what really drives concerns in the community because too often assumptions were made that may have been wrong.

While governments have also had a raft of wider issues to deal with emanating from Covid-19, such as managing the economy and breathing new life into business sectors, they have also faced criticism for loosening restrictions too soon.

But Dr Ryan urged health experts to stand up for their convictions amid an array of competing priorities among policymakers.

“This is a time, and I’m sorry to say it quite openly, where politics has crushed public health in many circumstances,” Dr Ryan said.

“It is time for public health leaders all over the world to stand up for our communities, to stand up for science, to stand up for what is right, and be open to criticism when we do that and be open to be challenged and be prepared to be wrong, because no one is right all the time.

“I do think we need courage and we need the courage of our convictions and we need to do that every day. The price we may pay for that sometimes is our career but what the hell, at the end of the day we serve people.”

Anti-lockdown protesters clash with police during a demonstration against lockdown measures in Westminster, London. EPA

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned it is a critical moment for many countries in the northern hemisphere as they grabble with a surge in cases, and governments introduce tougher restrictions on movement and social activities.