Investing in preventive measures is 500 times cheaper than post-pandemic costs: Study

Preparing for a pandemic is way cheaper than dealing with its fallout, a new research posits.

Besides the obvious costs to the economy and healthcare industry along with the loss of livelihoods, a lot of costs arising from our inability to keep rainforests protected has made the pandemic more expensive by trillions of dollars.

If our tropical rainforests were better equipped to deal with the fallout of the pandemic, trillions could have been saved.

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Disharmony in nature: more pandemics

Scientists have posited how the pandemic is a direct consequence of the disharmony brewing in nature owing to climate change and depletion of natural resources, including tropical forests.

Owing to this, new diseases like coronavirus that may be transmitted from animals to humans have emerged and will continue to increase.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has infected over 17 million people around the world, and is allegedly came from bats in China.

“Much of this traces back to our indifference about what has been occurring at the edges of tropical forests,” said Les Kaufman, a coauthor of a policy document in “Science”.

He put together a team to understand the economic implications of the pandemic, and to limit the transmission of the virus.

They discovered that reducing the transmission of new diseases in tropical forests would cost between $22.2 and $30.7 billion. This might seem like a huge amount, which it is.

But when compared to what the pandemic will actually cost us, it seems like a negligible amount. The pandemic is costing us between $8.1 and $15.8 trillion globally, which is over 500 times the cost of preventive measures.

Researches took into the lost GDP and cost of economic and workforce cost of deaths around the world to ascertain total financial losses.

But why tropical forests?

Researchers say most transmission of diseases between animals and humans takes place in tropical forests. As humans venture into untouched territories seeking natural exploits, the changes of contracting such viruses increase. And with ever depleting resources, people are entering more uncharted territories than ever.

These activities include logging, cattle ranching, livestock businesses, and exotic animal trade.

In essence, we need to invest in protecting and demarcating ecosystems, as they were naturally intended to be, otherwise such pandemics will keep showing up, and we’ll have no defence against them.

To counter these effects, researchers believe the need of the hour is to invest money in ending wild meat trade in China, coming up with policies to cut down on deforestation by 40 per cent, and by fighting chances of disease transmission from wild animals to livestock.