Foreword
The accelerating pace and pervasiveness of infectious disease has raised serious questions about how we safeguard our mental and physical well-being moving forward, while maintaining some semblance of our highly social and mobile 21st century lives. Tack on the debilitating damage we’ve inflicted on Mother Earth since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and it’s easy to conclude our very survival is not guaranteed – modern medicine notwithstanding.
The optimists among us realize not all is lost. Life will go on after the great pause ends. But to approximate business as usual, we must consciously rethink our behaviors across multiple vectors of our personal and professional lives while also ramping up our use of technology tools like artificial intelligence (AI) to more quickly understand the foe we face. How we do this is what this special report explores.
As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” To some extent, realizing those dreams depends on our use of high-speed communications like 5G networks, AI, predictive analytics, high-resolution imaging and truly interoperable electronic medical records, without which it’s impossible to achieve the scale and speed required to discover treatments if not a cure. AI, in particular, will play a critical role by accelerating our scientific understanding of the incubation and spread of infectious disease. Moreover, AI will enable more proactive ways of diagnosing, mitigating, preventing and treating outbreaks before they reach pandemic levels.
However, we can’t expect modern technology to deliver a brighter and more beautiful tomorrow without changes to the way we live, work and play.
The on-ramp to an effective infectious disease strategy starts with basic blocking and tackling. This means a massive rebuild of our global health system to support more resilient supply chains that make fighting disease and delivering healthcare more effective and time- and cost-efficient for all – from medical researchers and doctors, through hospital systems and patients. And in a world where social distancing remains the norm, technology will play a role in narrowing the divide between personal and public health. We will all be empowered – like it or not – to more precisely manage our personal health via the latest technology (wearables that monitor our vitals and share data across public and private health apps).
As obvious as this sounds, a healthier world will also require us to maintain and enforce better hygienic standards (both personally and in the physical spaces we occupy) – and that’s not just surface-level cleanliness. This is particularly true in highly-trafficked and congested urban areas such as New York, London and Mumbai (among other cities), which have emerged as ground zero for pandemic percolation.
Our highly interconnected and interdependent 21st global economy will also need a rethink. Business success has pivoted around our willingness to hop on planes, trains and automobiles to attend conferences, meet with clients, business partners and colleagues, unintentionally sharing whatever germs we encounter along the way. Stopping the spread of disease will mean subjecting travelers to strict health monitoring, similar to the tight security measures followed at airports.
As such, we are all data points to be collected, mined and shared to contain, mitigate and proactively respond to infectious diseases before they strike. Our stance on data privacy vs. disease prevention will be severely challenged in the years to come.
But all this will be for naught if we don’t change how we care for our planet. Feeding and sustaining our individual and collective well-being will be impossible without altering the way we raise livestock, grow crops and process food at all touchpoints on the value chain. Remember, the most likely explanation for the emergence of the coronavirus is the wet markets of Wuhan, China.
Solving future pandemics, of course, will require tighter global alliances that span the private and public sectors and academia, as well as government and non-government institutions. Success depends on harnessing the collective wherewithal of the scientific, technology, public health and policy-making communities, each with independent marching orders and disconnected puzzle pieces that must be assembled to thwart infectious disease before it arises.
But this will only work if we can encourage global leaders, policy makers and captains of big business to realize that the fight against infectious disease is not a zero-sum game. There will be many compromises along the way to preserve humankind, particularly the intelligent relaxation of regulatory hurdles that elongate the approval process for new treatments and cures.
While preventing the future spread of viruses like COVID-19 is today’s existential threat, many health-related concerns await us. The emergence of pathogens unfazed by antibacterial treatments is yet another challenge in our global battle with infectious disease.
We must learn from our lack of preparedness for COVID-19, a novel coronavirus that some in the scientific community knew was all but inevitable. As with the Spanish Flu, we can’t let our collective guard down and suffer the consequences of the preventable, if not containable, recurrence of future infectious disease.
The following essays from our brain trust across our healthcare and life sciences practices, as well as the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work, illuminate the hard work and effort that is critical to confronting and defeating infectious disease. While we don’t have all the answers, we hope the applied thinking laid out in the pages that follow provides enough food for thought to allow us to all live long and prosper.
This foreword was written by Alan Alper, Cognizant’s Vice President of Global Thought Leadership Programs. Read more about Alan.
