Coronavirus Today: Pandemic resolutions for the new year (and beyond)

Good evening. I’m Karen Kaplan, and it’s Tuesday, Dec. 20. We’ll be taking a holiday break for the next two weeks so this will be the last edition until Jan. 10. I hope you stay COVID-free as you celebrate with friends and family! In the meantime, here’s the latest on what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.

With December drawing to a close, it’s time to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Thanks to our pandemic-era work-from-home culture, I’ve finally knocked two long-standing items — prepare more meals from scratch and spend more time reading — off my list. (I’m still working on getting eight hours of sleep per night.)

The people who are already thinking about the next pandemic have some resolutions too. Their goal is to get the world in better shape to meet the next global health crisis when it inevitably arises.

These folks are working under the auspices of the World Health Organization, which explains their klunky name: the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, or INB for short. You can think of it as a pandemic version of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

The INB represents 194 member states, and getting everyone to agree on a plan won’t be easy. So far, the members have agreed to produce a first draft of a legally binding agreement sometime next year. They gathered in Geneva this month and will meet again in February. If they stick to their schedule, their final accord will be ready to be presented to the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body, in May 2024.

Though there’s still a very long way to go, it’s clear from INB’s “conceptional zero draft” (a first draft of its first draft) that the experts are thinking big. Members are examining the cultural, educational, economic, political, legal and environmental issues that influence the public’s health and its ability to respond to — if not prevent — an outbreak of pandemic proportions.

They’re also embracing the One Health approach, which acknowledges that our health depends on the health of other animals and the environment we share. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is believed to have originated in bats, then likely infected other animals before jumping to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. Influenza, which has caused four pandemics in the last century, comes from birds. The more carefully we tread in the world, the lower the risk that a dangerous pathogen will cross the species barrier.

The conceptual zero draft lays out core principles that negotiators would like to see reflected in the final agreement, including the notions that “all lives have equal value” and that the “enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being.”

It also recaps some of the failures of the world’s COVID-19 response, including the inability to ensure that all countries received vaccines, personal protective equipment, medical supplies, oxygen, coronavirus tests and other essential items in a timely manner.

Then it gets to the most consequential part — its goals. In its current form, it reads more like a wish list than an enforceable treaty. Still, knowing what the INB would like to see happen ought to shed some light on what the final agreement will contain.

A UNICEF worker checks boxes of COVID-19 vaccine that were donated to COVAX, the acronym for COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access. COVAX was formed to make sure that low- and middle-income countries have fair access to the shots. In future pandemics, countries should do a better job of sharing resources like vaccines, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body says.

(Brian Inganga / Associated Press)

The draft calls on countries to shore up their health systems so that, even in a pandemic, the public can maintain access to routine care without having to worry that their doctors — or urgent care clinics or hospitals — are swamped with sick patients. What’s more, the document urges countries to implement universal health coverage to boost their citizens’ baseline health and make it easier to help them deal with the aftermath of an outbreak.

Public health infrastructure should be strengthened too, so there can be enough people to track an outbreak and develop the tools and systems necessary to contain it. That includes distributing vaccines (once they become available), managing diagnostic laboratories and gathering specimens for genetic analysis, among myriad other tasks.

Both of those things will require a skilled workforce. To that end, countries should recruit capable people from all corners of society and make sure good talent isn’t being wasted due to gender, racial or ethnic discrimination, the draft says. In addition, countries should jointly support a “global public health emergency workforce” whose members can be dispatched to hot-spot areas as needed.

Hot spots will need stuff as well as people. That means nations will have to work together to create supply chain networks capable of getting resources anywhere in the world as rapidly as possible. They’ll also need affordable access to intellectual property, such as recipes for making lifesaving medicines and vaccines. Private companies should be encouraged to share their know-how and waive their licensing fees during an emergency, the draft says.

Crucially, the countries that ultimately sign this agreement should commit to increasing “science, public health and pandemic literacy,” according to the conceptual zero draft. That will mean studying the ways misinformation and disinformation spread and scouring social media to flag falsehoods that gain traction. Then someone will need to come up with a way to convince people what’s fake news and what’s real. (Amen to that!)

This is not an exhaustive list of what the INB members think it will take to up our game in a future pandemic. Even if it were, it’s not as though making these things happen will be easy.

Likewise, I can almost guarantee that 2023 will not be the year that (finally) sees me getting more than six hours of sleep a night. But I’d really like want it to be. And if that New Year’s resolution remains unfulfilled 12 months from now, it’ll be on my list for 2024. If I don’t even try to make it happen, it never will.

By the numbers

California cases and deaths as of 4:15 p.m. Tuesday:

Track California’s coronavirus spread and vaccination efforts — including the latest numbers and how they break down — with our graphics.

How the pandemic helped workers with disabilities

From our Pandemic Silver Linings Department comes a story about a group of marginalized people who are finally getting a chance to shine now that remote work for some has become the new normal.

I’m talking about people like Russel Rawlings of Sacramento, who has cerebral palsy. Before the coronavirus came along, he used to go into his office at a nonprofit independent living center five days a week. The 2-mile commute in his powered wheelchair required him to wake up at 5 a.m. in order to be at his desk by 8 a.m.

Now Rawlings has a new job that he can do from home full time. Being an education organizer for a nonprofit that assists domestic workers is a huge step up because it doesn’t require a difficult commute. (Another bonus: The work is more fulfilling.)

“I never thought I would be able to do community organization remotely,” said Rawlings, who struggled to find any job just a few years ago.

He’s hardly the only one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says more than 7.3 million people with disabilities were in the labor force last month, an increase of nearly 25% since the start of the pandemic.

The unemployment rate for these workers now stands at 5.8% — nearly twice the rate for workers as a whole, but less than half what it was two years ago. In fact, the current jobless rate for workers with disabilities is the lowest it’s been since the government began tracking it in 2008, my colleague Don Lee reports.

The country’s embrace of telework is “a total game changer,” said Mason Ameri, who studies disability employment trends at Rutgers Business School.

For people with disabilities, simply getting to the office can be a big barrier to employment. Working from home can cut the commute to seconds.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

In theory, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was supposed to make life easier for these workers. The law says employers must be willing to make a “reasonable accommodation” to an employee with a disability.

Deciding what counts as “reasonable” is often tricky, but the…