Proactive approach to health surveillance could cost less in the long run

From left: Mamello Thinyane, Hannah Thinyane and Michael Gallo

During an exclusive interview with the Times, a research assistant at the United Nations University Institute in Macau argued that the outbreak of Covid-19 showed that governments worldwide should invest more in proactive surveillance systems to prevent major health outbreaks and prolonged consequences.
“In public health you have active surveillance which is monitoring something that is occurring in real-time, which is basically what we are doing now, but you also have proactive surveillance, which is related to the gathering of information on something before it happens and to prevent it from happening,” said Michael Gallo, who holds a Bachelor of Science degree with Honors in Biochemistry from Moravian College.
The proactive surveillance type has an “upstream focus,” that helps to prevent or at least to reduce some of the social and economic problems resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gallo said that by tackling these issues proactively, health officials can reduce the long-term damage caused by them. He said this concept could lead to a grounded justification for public health expenditure on the basis of averting higher costs downstream.
“Let’s say that we could invest 10 or 20 million U.S. dollars [80-160 million patacas] in some kind of monitoring system for infectious diseases. If that was working effectively, we could compare it with the costs that we are now experiencing and that we can actually quantify losses of productivity and damages to the economy,” he said.
This would “convince people that the costs are much smaller if you invest upstream.”
“But, we know that governments are not usually thinking in the mid and long-term; they usually focus only on the short-term and immediate things that can be shown to the public,” remarked Gallo.