More than a year after it began, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt essential health services, including routine childhood immunizations, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) second pulse survey. The survey asked countries to report the level of disruption in their jurisdictions to 63 health services during the previous three months. 135 countries and territories from across the six WHO regions responded with data covering October 2020 to February 2021.

“The pandemic has undoubtedly resulted in more deaths and more illness – particularly for the most vulnerable women and children,” write the authors of a new United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) report examining the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Asia. The report found that the disruptions in several essential health services due to the COVID-19 pandemic had a “substantial impact” on maternal and child mortality in the region.

Joyce Makasi, a young woman in Kambiti village, Kitui County, Kenya, went into labor with her second child one afternoon in December 2020. She had just enough money to hire a motorbike to take her to nearby Waita health center. At the facility, the clinical officer and nurse told her she would need a cesarean delivery. It wouldn’t be her first cesarean, but COVID-19 presented new obstacles.

According to the World Health Organization, 1 in 3 women in the world will experience physical or sexual violence during their lifetime. Intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence, impacting an estimated 641 million women worldwide. Lockdowns and disruptions in access to support services due to the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated the prevalence of gender-based violence (GBV).

“Greater attention to pregnant patients as a unique population at higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection sequelae, is critical to preventing maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality,” write the authors of a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology examining morbidity and mortality among pregnant women with COVID-19 in Washington state. The study found “markedly higher” hospitalization and fatality rates among this group compared with similarly-aged non-pregnant individuals.

Africa was predicted to be hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, given its poor health systems. However, this outcome has not been the case. Despite the U.S. being the highest spender on health care globally, COVID-19 has shown that its primary care infrastructure is in much need of strengthening. But we should not mistake COVID-19 as the biggest pandemic of our time. If anything, it is only a dry run, with other epidemics brewing on the horizon. Therefore, if the global community is serious about epidemic preparedness, global health security, and protecting the most vulnerable, we need to redesign health systems for resilience. Africa’s lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as from concurrent outbreaks of cholera, Ebola virus disease, yellow fever, and chikungunya, could provide a roadmap.

Eleven months have passed since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). As we rang in the new year, the world surpassed two million deaths due to COVID-19. While it is encouraging that 77 countries have distributed 168 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, only a small fraction of these are in low-income countries. Vaccinations may not be widely distributed in most of sub-Saharan Africa until 2022-2023. Furthermore, the new COVID-19 variant recently discovered in South Africa is estimated to be 50 percent more contagious, underscoring the need for a collaborative international response.

Environmental peacebuilding could benefit from COVID-era data innovation. A well-documented obstacle environmental peacebuilders face is a lack of shared, empirical datasets among parties engaged in, recovering from, or descending into conflict. Current innovations in data collection may soon help seal these gaps. 

Countries throughout the world have expanded their data collection capabilities to track the spread of COVID-19. From text message contact tracing to drone surveillance, these innovations inform national responses and shape the global case counting webpages that many of us anxiously refresh every day. The information networks established during the pandemic may endure far into the future, informing new goals, projects, and policies.