You don’t have to die from COVID-19 anymore. That’s the message from Dr. Atul Gawande, assistant administrator of global health for USAID.
At the same time, people are dying from a whole host of diseases as primary care took a back seat to COVID-19, which spurred the largest reduction in global life expectancy since World War II.
Turning the coronavirus into “a manageable, endemic respiratory illness requires recognizing that at this moment, we are not yet in the aftermath of the pandemic, but we are in the aftermath of the pandemic emergency,” Gawande told Devex Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar during a discussion last week at the Meridian International Center in Washington, D.C.
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About the author
Anna Gawel
Anna Gawel is the Managing Editor of Devex. She previously worked as the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat, the flagship publication of D.C.’s diplomatic community. She’s had hundreds of articles published on world affairs, U.S. foreign policy, politics, security, trade, travel and the arts on topics ranging from the impact of State Department budget cuts to Caribbean efforts to fight climate change. She was also a broadcast producer and digital editor at WTOP News and host of the Global 360 podcast. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.
