Press Center

From the article: "Susannah Hares, co-director of the global education program at the Center for Global Development, a research group, said the decision to keep schools closed until January was 'understandable,' because public school classrooms are crowded, and many lack facilities for hand-washing. But the move, she said, is 'likely to be devastating for children' because the poor will be at a disadvantage and some will not come back when schools reopen. In addition, she predicted there would be more teenage pregnancies and, without school food programs, more hunger. Kenya’s government acknowledged the challenges inherent in closing schools, including unequal access to learning platforms, a possible increase in domestic violence against children and the likelihood that dropout rates will rise."

From the article: "The fund’s lack of consistency attracts criticism, too. Since the coronavirus pandemic began it has revised down growth in rich countries in 2020 by three percentage points more than that in developing ones. That is odd, argued Justin Sandefur of the Centre for Global Development, another think-tank, and Arvind Subramanian of Ashoka University, in June. Lockdowns and social distancing are at least as severe in poor countries as in rich ones. But fiscal responses have been much weaker, and, as the fund itself has argued, capital outflows and currency pressure are bigger threats. Perhaps, the authors speculate, the fund has been rosier about poorer countries this time in order to avoid having to provide support. Theimf says that China’s success in containing the virus explains why its forecasts are more positive for developing countries and strongly denies lending influences its growth forecasts."

From the article: "In May 2018, with leaders in the White House and Congress who had never dealt with a major epidemic, Inglesby and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University hosted an exercise in Washington DC called Clade X. It featured a respiratory virus that was engineered in a laboratory. One early lesson of this simulation was that travel bans didn’t stop the virus from gaining ground. Infections spread rapidly below the radar because half of the people infected showed few or no symptoms. Medical supplies ran short, and hospitals were overwhelmed. Federal and state leaders issued conflicting messages. More than 20 months passed before a vaccine was available. Six top-line recommendations emerged from the exercise. These included reducing vaccine production time, and creating a 'robust, highly capable national public health system that can manage the challenges of pandemic response'. Some argue, however, that this emphasis was misplaced in subsequent discussions. Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC, says that members of the biosecurity community have often focused on vaccines, rather than on the complex, systemic deficiencies in the public-health system. They often overlooked the 'middle game' in outbreak responses. 'We have a strong end game once there is a vaccine, and we have a strong opening game if countries contain an outbreak when case numbers are low,' he says. But insufficient attention is devoted to harnessing and coordinating enough health workers and biomedical resources to efficiently test people, treat them, find their contacts and quarantine them. This is precisely the conundrum that the United States finds itself in right now."