Victoria Fan, a senior fellow in global health at the Center for Global Development, a think tank, says this kind of high-quality data would be an important tool for tracking pathogens of pandemic potential and supporting a timely response by other countries.
“Ensuring timely, accurate, quality data will remain the key challenge as countries reporting [a disease outbreak] face negative penalties,” she told SciDev.Net, citing as an example South Africans facing global travel bans after the country announced detection of the new Omicron strain of COVID-19 in late 2021.
