Long COVID has emerged as a serious chronic condition 19, 20, 21 that represents a considerable burden of disease and still lacks adequate understanding and appropriate preventive or curative solutions. Low vaccination rates 16 may compound the risk from waning immunity 17, 18. Reinfection risks are not fully understood. Highly transmissible variants continue to spread globally, while surveillance for variants of concern remains largely inadequate 13, 14, 15. The healthcare for millions more people has been delayed, often as a result of overwhelmed health systems 9, 10, 11, 12. As of September 2022, more than 620 million cases of COVID-19 and over 6.5 million deaths have been reported 6, although mortality estimates range as high as 20 million 7, 8. Today, almost 3 years after SARS-CoV-2 was first identified and more than 1.5 years after the first vaccines became available, pandemic fatigue 5 threatens to undercut our vigilance and the effectiveness of our responses to ongoing and new pandemic-related challenges. Pandemics have disrupted societies and impacted public health throughout human history 4. The findings of the study, which have been further endorsed by 184 organizations globally, include points of unanimous agreement, as well as six recommendations with >5% disagreement, that provide health and social policy actions to address inadequacies in the pandemic response and help to bring this public health threat to an end. Other recommendations with at least 99% combined agreement advise governments and other stakeholders to improve communication, rebuild public trust and engage communities 3 in the management of pandemic responses. In the wake of nearly three years of fragmented global and national responses, it is instructive to note that three of the highest-ranked recommendations call for the adoption of whole-of-society and whole-of-government approaches 1, while maintaining proven prevention measures using a vaccines-plus approach 2 that employs a range of public health and financial support measures to complement vaccination. The panel developed a set of 41 consensus statements and 57 recommendations to governments, health systems, industry and other key stakeholders across six domains: communication health systems vaccination prevention treatment and care and inequities. Here we convened, as part of this Delphi study, a diverse, multidisciplinary panel of 386 academic, health, non-governmental organization, government and other experts in COVID-19 response from 112 countries and territories to recommend specific actions to end this persistent global threat to public health. Nature volume 611, pages 332–345 ( 2022) Cite this articleĭespite notable scientific and medical advances, broader political, socioeconomic and behavioural factors continue to undercut the response to the COVID-19 pandemic 1, 2. A multinational Delphi consensus to end the COVID-19 public health threat
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