This session will discuss how different governments responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and develop best practices from past lessons learned on how to handle current and future pandemics. A panel of disaster response experts from all over the globe will revise the difference between engaging in a disaster response versus a public health response.

Governments and organizations handled COVID-19 as a healthcare emergency, and the efforts deployed left our healthcare workforce exposed and vulnerable. In this session, we will dig into how we could've protected our healthcare workers by taking a holistic and integrated disaster response.

The session will answer questions about what components of disaster and public health responses were present or missing in protecting our healthcare workers and community and when an outbreak should become a disaster response.

Join us as we discuss the difference that would have made if governments and other organizations had deployed a disaster response to the COVID-19 pandemic instead of a healthcare response.