ECOSF joined the Webinar entitled, “COVID-19 Epidemiology, Evidence Based Policy and Prospects for Vaccine” arranged by COMSTECH-ICCBS
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A webinar entitled, “COVID-19 Epidemiology, Evidence Based Policy and Prospects for Vaccine” was arranged by the COMSTECH on May 6, 2020. A large of number of doctors, scientists, educationists, health personnel and senior managers attended the online seminar. Prof. Manzoor Soomro President ECOSF was also among the participants and contributed in the discussions.
Prof. Iqbal Chaudhry, Coordinator General of COMSECH opened the webinar and welcomed all the online participants. He also thanked the sole speaker of the webinar Dr. Saad Omer of Yale Institute of Global Health, Yale-USA for delivering the presentation on the topic. Prof. Chaudhry hoped that the presentation would benefit the Muslim Ummah and humanity at large.
Dr. Saad Omer in his presentation shared that the novel corona virus is not first pandemic which the world is facing currently but in the past more deadly pandemics have been faced by the world, such as Plague, Spanish Flu, Measles, SARS, etc. He further said that after the outbreak of SARS COV-2 (COVID-19) in China in Dec 2019, currently USA has become the epicenter of the virus, followed by Europe. More than 3.5 million people have been affected world over which tells us how much the world system is fragile.
He also shared that the rate for infectious from primary cases to secondary is about 2 to 3 persons in COVID-19 whereas Measles had the rate of 15 persons, means more deadly and dangerous than COVID-19.
In his presentation, Dr. Omer also said that we continue to learn from the virus every day and every week. If we have a gap to assimilate the ability to emerging information and policy making, we make bad decisions and if we empower the scientists to devise the policy and make decisions, we can lessen the gap and take better decisions, said Dr. Omer. There should not be false assurance and a clear policy should be followed. The spread of scientific and public misinformation is common in the era of pandemics so we have to safeguard and minimize the misinformation, so that we can reduce the risks. He also opined that dealing with any pandemic, needs to be preemptive; otherwise the damages becomes uncontrolled.
Dr. Omer further said that for dealing COVID-19, extensive testing should be done, house hold transmission should be reduced, social distancing be maintained and additional treatment options be utilized to enhance the immunity of people.
Dr. Saad also defined the vaccine and its development processes in detail and said that it has various stages such as; pathogen identification & isolation, candidate design, animal testing, approval of the vaccine by drug regulators and then trials of vaccine on humans. The whole process is complex and needs extensive care otherwise the results can be inversed.