Tune in to Focus Carolina during morning, noon and evening drive times and on the weekends to hear stories from faculty members at UNC and find out what ignites their passion for their work. Focus Carolina is an exclusive program on 97.9 The Hill WCHL, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Benjamin Mason Meier and his team at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health have been working on the coronavirus pandemic response since February developing research that does three things.
First, Dr. Meier and his team are supporting the United Nations and helping them to understand how human rights can frame the pandemic response. This includes how human rights are limited in the pandemic response, whether limiting travel, freedom of movement or privacy.
Second, they are working with the World Health Organization to understand what types of public policy reforms governments will need to develop in order to respond to the pandemic.
Third, his team is reflecting on the limitations of the current response and examining the reforms in the global health governance that will be necessary for nations to meet future threats.
“I hope to provide a timeline of how public policy is driven the pandemic from the start and how public policy now will be necessary and bringing an end to this cataclysmic thread,” Dr. Meier said. “I spent the last decade trying to understand these global policy efforts and really to use my research to frame the policies that are necessary to prevent, detect, and respond to disease.”
Dr. Meier said the Chinese government was seen as the most effective at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The government locked down Wuhan for 10 straight weeks,” he said. “No one left their home at all before opening. It was seen initially that this was the type of aggressive response that was necessary in order to defeat this disease.”
While it was seen initially that this type of response was necessary, recent examples have shown that transparent government institutions are more effective at containing the spread of coronavirus.
“In South Korea and Taiwan, we’ve seen vast testing resources, testing people multiple times, developing a contact tracing system for anyone who has tested positive for this disease.”
This contrasts with the United States, which Dr. Meier said never really took the threat seriously and did not prepare until it was too late.
“In the absence of a federal response,” Meier said, “we’ve seen 50 different states develop 50 different state responses to this pandemic. We’re already beginning to see challenges is different states open up too soon.”
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