Preparing For The Next Pandemic: The Trinity Challenge

The recently launched Trinity Challenge, a worldwide call for data-based, ground-breaking solutions to identify, respond to, and recover from the next pandemic, began accepting applications for proposals in mid-October and will run through mid-January. This crowd-sourced request for proposals was the brainchild of Dame Sally Davies, the U.K.’s former Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health. Currently Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, hence the name Trinity Challenge, Dame Sally has assembled an impressive coalition of 20 world-leading businesses to help support this effort— not-for-profits, researchers, educators and other household names such as the Gates Foundation, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Tencent, Northeastern University. My own firm, Legal & General, is included among these, and could play a number of roles collaborating with other participants including analyzing rich shared data and bringing our statistical and real-life actuarial expertise in aging, mortality and morbidity to bear to help devise better risk management and mitigation techniques.

This initiative also falls under several of our Inclusive Capitalism tenets, for example, that investments must benefit the broadest range of people,  that investments work to solve market or policy failures, that they strive to use technology for broader benefits, and that we create new investments, rather than chasing the same assets, one cause of asset bubbles. Not least, the Trinity Challenge offers a pool of $13 million-some in prize money, intended to fund several winning pieces of research.

The Trinity Challenge is about innovating preparedness for future pandemics. The insurance industry models for pandemic risk, and in the West we’ve had a half dozen near misses so far this century, between SARS, MIRS, Ebola, Avian Flu and others. Still, we all seemed unprepared when it happened again. We know there will be other pandemics after this one—the question is not if, but when, and how soon. Even as we remain suspended in the current Covid-19 crisis, scientists are warning that with global warming and population density, we could be in for many and more frequent pandemics.

One goal of the Trinity Challenge is to ensure that at least one billion people will be better protected from the next pandemic than they were during this current one. America’s experience shows that the novel coronavirus does not discriminate -  rich, poor, it can infect everyone… but America’s poor and minorities were disproportionately affected. This WSJ article personifying the virus as a “killer with a crowbar,” “hitchhiking across continents,” and “a social climber” may point a way toward taking a multi-pronged approach to defeating it; contained in what this virus did should be some cautions for next time. But it’s important to keep in mind that low-paid essential workers in the real economy took bigger risks than those who are better-off: nurses, delivery drivers, garbage collectors, postal workers and grocery clerks didn’t have the choice of isolating themselves in nice apartments or country homes and conduct their business via Zoom.

Lessons From This Time, For Next Time

The advances we’ve seen since March 2020—including mass testing, track and trace, treatment, and vaccination development—have all been greatly accelerated, though inevitably not linear. What can we learn from this time? Before the data scientists even put pen to paper to come up with future solutions, here are a few of the lessons we can take from Covid-19 that may inform some of the ways we should be prepared for the next pandemic. My hope is that some innovators out there will be able to make use of them.

Lesson 1: Don’t underestimate it; assume the worst the fastest. There are 1,200 different coronavirus strains, and this one—Covid-19—kills 0.6 percent of people it infects (6 in 1,000); by contrast, 0.1 percent of those who are infected die of the flu. Covid 19 has been particularly severe for older people. Key workers and poorer people who have also suffered disproportionately. While the Spanish Flu of 1919 was also a killer of children and the young, coronaviruses are even more contagious than flu. Recall that this is only one possible source of an epidemic.   

Lesson 2: Everyone needs to know what’s going on, and especially what they personally should be doing to avoid being infected. One great failing of the Covid response, in all but a handful of countries, was a lack of centralized messaging, with leaky rules. In the U.K., the initial messaging to shut down the economy was clear and helped. But the messaging to start reopening, subject to being careful, has been much more difficult, especially given regional variations. I feel there is a need to understand personal risk better: there are levels, as there are when crossing a road. Rather than trying to sprint across a freeway, you want to find a pedestrian crossing; but if you are without sight, you need a junction with a motion sensor, a “talking” traffic light. This approach to risk hierarchy requires a mix of better data and better messaging.

Possibly, in our current situation, it becomes less an issue of persuasion than of enforcement. But what to enforce? We might well need an independent, non-government controlled, non-political agency whose sole purpose is to keep track of the latest information and put out consistent messaging about what the general population should do. In tandem, it would be useful to have an alliance or consortium that supports business-government collaboration on a global level through pandemic times. There’s nothing like a pandemic for distributing power and the need for accurate information.

Lesson 3: We need to identify vectors much faster: In cities like Chicago, we’re seeing the application of data analysis and computer modeling to wastewater testing to quickly identify and isolate new outbreaks of the pandemic. Data collection through wastewater epidemiology testing becomes a practical alternative to the  challenge of testing massive numbers of individuals one person at a time, to help manage the spread. Researchers from my alma mater, Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed Biobot Analytics to address such public health challenges.  

Another approach could be analyzing business travel, tracking which industries are going back and forth across continents the most. Where was the response—whether identification, testing, or messaging—slowest and weakest? And, the corollary:

Lesson 3a: Identify real sources vs. ones we’ve been conditioned to have prejudices against. Politics often divide, and so politicizing the situation runs counter to the public’s welfare and safety. However, in a positive example of political leadership, in the U.S., during the early months of the Covid crisis, New York State governor Andrew Cuomo became a trusted voice. Why? Because he instituted a well-organized daily ritual of addressing the people with scientific facts. Toward the end of April, Cuomo surmised, by looking at the data, that the coronavirus had entered New York from Europe, specifically Italy, not China. Rhetoric against China misdirected blame and took attention away from the true source of the problem and even more importantly, what to do about it. 

Lesson 4: There is a body of preparedness study already out there—we aren’t the first to be thinking about this. Now let’s use it! Vietnam and Korea did. This PBS article points to one well-researched document that outlines exact steps to take in the event of a pandemic; it also specifically names the threat of novel coronaviruses. Here is their link to the 69-page Obama playbook, Towards Epidemic Prediction: Federal Efforts and Opportunities In Outbreak Modeling. As of this writing, President Elect Biden has announced a 13-member virus taskforce which includes seasoned medical administrators, academics, and researchers. This is good news.

Lesson 5: Look at successful responses and emulate them next time. What infrastructure did countries with low infection transmission and death rates have in place? America may not have used its own pandemic playbook, but Vietnam did. With not a single death from Covid, Vietnam achieved this by using the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plan. Korea also worked in tandem with the CDC to develop rapid and ultra-accurate testing. According to this Science Daily article, South Korea also conducted interviews with patients and triangulated multiple sources of information, such as medical records, credit card and GPS data. A 2020 survey found that 84 percent of South Koreans accepted the loss of privacy as “a necessary tradeoff for public health security.” That illustrates the critical difference between acting and arguing.

This is the moment for inclusive and collaborative capitalism. We need innovators to up the ante on our preparedness for the next pandemic. We need to identify areas where business, whether through investment, manufacturing, or other, can get practically and positively involved. We’ll need research, immediate availability of protective equipment, temporary quarantine facilities and hospitals, and more in order to understand and communicate how the next virus will be transmitted, and what to do the minute it has let loose. We have amazing access to data that can help these Trinity Challenge innovators; we also have the financial wherewithal to help them scale their winning solutions.

There’s the next crisis to solve. Let’s get to work—for ourselves and for future generations.