COVID-19 pandemic turns five years today: Research reveals alarming ‘vaccine deserts’
World | Health and Wellness | Trending: Explore the five-year impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report highlighting alarming vaccine deserts.
Five years ago, on March 11, the World Health Organization announced that Covid-19 had become a pandemic. Five weeks before that, the WHO had sounded its highest alarm, a warning that went largely unheeded. In the following days, the virus went on to kill millions across the globe, partly due to vaccine accessibility, found a new report.
What happened in March 2020?
At a press conference on March 11, 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the United Nations’s health agency, announced that the worsening outbreak could now be characterised as the dreaded “p” word — a pandemic.
The utterance spurred the world into action, but it was too little, too late. The coronavirus pandemic went on to shred economies, kill millions, and cripple health systems globally.
Vaccine deserts
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New research offering unprecedented insights into global vaccine distribution patterns during the pandemic has found significant disparities in COVID-19 vaccination accessibility.
The research by experts at the University of Glasgow, University of Hong Kong, University College London, and Kyung Hee University has identified 'vaccine deserts' in both high- and low-income countries.
As per the research published in BMJ Journals, there was a significant disparity in vaccine accessibility. An analysis of 54 countries/regions revealed that in only about 24 per cent of the surveyed areas, people could access the nearest vaccination services within 15 minutes. Other areas, labelled “vaccine deserts” — regions with geographic obstacles to vaccine-related herd immunity — saw people travel over one hour due to “transportation barriers, limited vaccine supplies with the higher vaccine demands, and lower socioeconomic status.”
The research notably “has demonstrated a correlation between vaccine accessibility and vaccination rates”. It states that previously, too, “studies have found that a higher density of vaccine sites correlates with increased vaccination rates across US counties, regardless of socioeconomic status.”
(With inputs from agencies)
