Business Continuity and the Pandemic Threat - Learning from COVID-19 while preparing for the next pandemic

CHAPTER 10: TESTING AND TRACING

Within a week of declaring the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic, WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus broadcast an urgent message to the world:

“We have a simple message to all countries - test, test, test,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva, calling the pandemic “the defining global health crisis of our time.

All countries should be able to test all suspected cases, they cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded.

Without testing, cases cannot be isolated and the chain of infection will not be broken, he said.” (Farge and Revill, 2020)

At the start of 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been previously unknown, there were no specific tests available to positively ...