Do we have the scientific data to fight the pandemic?

We know how deadly Covid-19 infections can be, especially now with the second wave of the pandemic and a record number of daily death counts and infection rates. This is why it is so important to have accurate data that can give the kind of information required for policy-making and treatment. This has been reiterated by Dr Nazrul Islam in a report published in The Daily Star yesterday. In another report published by the same daily just four days ago, the chief of the National Technical Advisory Committee on Covid-19 (NTAC) echoed this view, highlighting the importance of vigorous scientific research to find out the reasons behind the second-wave of the Covid-19 epidemic. Both suggestions point to the dearth of scientific data having adverse impacts in tackling the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

According to the WHO, public health surveillance is needed as an early warning system to identify public health emergencies, guide public health policies, and monitor the epidemiology of a condition to set priorities. An effective surveillance system is comprised of detection of health events, collection of pertinent data, investigation of cases or outbreaks, preparing routine reports and forwarding them to respective administrative levels for further actions. The entry also mentions that some systems called "AFP Surveillance" have been set up in many countries which work as the backbone in curing vaccine-preventable diseases. Also, a global laboratory network has been established to find out the underlying reasons that cause vaccine-preventable diseases.

The joint advisory group that Dr Nazrul is part of was formed as a collaboration between the WHO and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs with a view to help the member states of these organisations to collect estimates of the number of deaths due to the direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic. Since 2016, the group has been analysing death reports from 29 countries around the world. Unfortunately, Bangladesh is not in this list as the country lacks in accurate and robust data collection on vital statistics, which help to analyse the trends and patterns of usual deaths and compare them with the deaths caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The government must take urgent steps to include Bangladesh in the aforementioned surveillance systems and global laboratory networks. Also, creation of a research culture in our local educational institutions is also crucial to lessen our dependence on foreign research activities in managing our domestic challenges. The government has to increase its spending, both to enable the academic community to carry out impactful scientific research projects, and also to set up new research organisations. Hiring the best academic staff, ensuring necessary infrastructure for high-quality research and foreign and domestic scholarship opportunities for bright but needy students can also be some of the measures that the respective authorities can initiate to reduce the dearth of scientific research work in our country.