Saudi Arabia’s delight in managing Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) disease has provided valuable data that has helped the government respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the kingdom’s deputy public fitness minister said Tuesday.
MERS, a coronavirus-type disease of the same viral circle of relatives as COVID-19 or SARS, was first recorded in Saudi Arabia in 2012. Between 2012 and March 2020, 2553 cases were recorded worldwide, with 876 deaths, according to World Health. Organization (WHO), which represents the particularly high fatality rate of the virus compared to coronavirus 2019.
“When we take a look at this disease, we have a bitter taste, but on the other hand, we have learned a lot from MERS,” Dr. Hani Jokhdar, Saudi Deputy Minister of Public Health of the Ministry of Health, said Tuesday.
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Saudi Arabia has taken many steps to respond to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic, adding the status quo of the comforts of driving testing across the Kingdom and the deployment of new fitness technologies to monitor the spread of the virus.
However, merS’s fatal pandemic has resulted in investments and wisdom gains that have helped the Saudi government fight COVID-19, either with the Kingdom command and control center and emergency operations center as a result of MERS investments, Jokhdar said.
In addition, unlike many countries, Saudi Arabia has experienced a significant shortage of non-public protection devices (PPEs) for the rescue, due to decisions of the source chain made after MERS.
“We never had a challenge with the PPE source because we were well prepared, we have a roadmap … We were able to meet our scalability requirement for PPE and brought in and encouraged local production long before we were affected by the cases, and all of this was learning from MERS,” jokhdar said.
Jokhdar speaking at the World Digital Health Summit in Riyadh on Tuesday. The event, which took place from August 11-12, brought together world fitness leaders from around the world to discuss how generating virtual fitness can help combat COVID-19 and long-term pandemics.
The Department of Health Affairs of the Ministry of The National Guard and the Ministry of Saudi Arabia of the G20 are organizing the two-day virtual summit in collaboration with the Saudi Centre for International Strategic Partnerships. The summit follows an ordinary G20 summit earlier this year in March, where members of the world’s 20 toughest countries expressed their commitment to combating the coronavirus pandemic as a united front.
Saudi Arabia has contributed directly to the fight around the world. In June, the UK expressed gratitude to Saudi Arabia for donating thousands of medical devices to the country’s national fitness service. The Kingdom also donated $150 million to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GIVA) and $500 million to foreign efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic.