Victoria Fan, senior fellow in global health at the Center for Global Development, a think tank, says this type of high-quality data would be an important tool for tracking pathogens with pandemic potential and helping other countries respond in a timely manner.
“Ensuring timely, accurate and high-quality data remains the main challenge for reporting countries [a disease outbreak] face negative penalties,” she said SciDev.Netand cites South Africans as an example who are facing global travel bans after the country announced the discovery of the new Omicron strain of COVID-19 in late 2021.
“It might be helpful to increase the positive incentives for reporting, such as paying countries for reporting, as well as reducing negative incentives, such as trade or travel restrictions imposed by other countries,” she added.
