Health vs. Wealth
Around the world, as the COVID pandemic plays out, some countries are starting to ease their restrictions; which is partially the result of the narrative that the economy and public health are on a set of scales and that they need to balance somehow. Can they?
The countries that are opening up now are the ones that closed down the earliest. And as a consequence, they were the ones that managed to control the pandemic best. So, for example, Austria or the Czech Republic or Slovakia, really got in there quickly and as a result, they’ve been able to limit the impact of the pandemic. So, they’re now, very tentatively, opening up.
There does exist a framework for achieving the right health vs economy balance, on which there’s a high degree of consensus.
This framework was put out as a roadmap by the European Union. It has been made very clear that everything will be driven by the epidemiology; by the health authorities. The economy is important, but it is secondary to sorting out the health situation and stopping the spread of the pandemic.
Public health has been a key pillar of supporting the economy in the world even pre-COVID. It was an important way of making sure that that the population was still productive and was able to work and live their lives fully. What the pandemic has done, is changed the balance.
A YouGov poll shows that of all the different issues that are most pressing right now, over 75 percent of the people said that health is the number one issue and second is the economy at 10 percentage points or less. So what this has shown is that health has always been important in countries such as Canada and the UK, unlike other countries, which misunderstand health as being about health care. So, in the United States, health has never made it to the top of the agenda because it’s sort of seen as a private consumption good.
The explanation of this is fundamental in its right regarding how countries decide to phase out the lockdowns, but also manage how the amazing amounts of money that’s going into the economies in order to support them and the individuals.
The idea that health is good for the economy is part of a longstanding debate that’s been going on for decades about whether development causes health or whether health causes economic development.
There have been numerous debates that have been going on and one of the achievements apparently in global health has been this idea that health is good for development but apparently, if we make an argument that health is good for the economy, people will invest more in the economy.
What I hope becomes clear is that we start to see that health is not just about access to health care and fundamental public health facilities, but also about how global institutions and international relations work impacts health.
I hope that it is a transition point where people will see you won’t be able to earn money and enjoy it if you’re actually dead or sick
Rida Khan, Journalist
- CEO, The Opinion Wire