(March 16th, 2020, New Delhi) PandemiCast, a new weekly video podcast, will look at how the COVID-19 pandemic is derailing health policy worldwide. The link to it is here.
In its first week, the PandemiCast panel will look at why various governments are reacting so differently to the pandemic. Public policy experts and journalists from India, Italy, Kenya the UK and the USA will explain what decision makers and the public are thinking and how policy is likely to evolve. There will also be a regular weekly analysis of media and social media trends, using global data from 300,000 news sources, 30 million blogs, and a continuous stream of social media posts spanning 205 countries in 87 languages.
Health Issues India and its social media channels will host PandemiCast, but its focus will be global. Specialists in global health, infectious diseases, epidemiology, and public policy are among those who will participate.
The focus of episode two will be what happens to the health priorities crowded out by an exclusive focus on the pandemic. From polio eradication to looming NCD epidemics, the world risks postponing critical decisions and planning.
“In most years, about 700,000 people die worldwide from seasonal flu…400,000 people (most of them young children) died from malaria in 2018,” said Mark Chataway, communications expert and founder of Health Issues India. “And that’s without the death and disability caused by NCDs: over 60 million Indians have diabetes and a million die from it every year; 2.2 million children in Delhi have irreversible lung damage because of pollution.”
Read Health Issues India’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here.
