Join us on June 6 for the discussion “How Do Pandemics End?” by ASF Visiting Lecturer Tony Sandset (Research Fellow, the Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo), as he looks at the impact of pandemics on our ideas about healthcare and how it is provided.

How do epidemics and pandemic end? The short answer is they don’t. With the somber realization that humanity has ever only eradicated one infectious disease — smallpox — these endings are more about transitions from epidemic to endemic, becoming lingering states of ongoing infections within the population. In today’s discussion, Tony Sandset will look on the impact of pandemics upon our ideas of healthcare and how it is provided, and why we need to double down on our focus on prevention and health equity.

He’ll also explore how we need to broaden our perspectives on pandemic preparedness to include social vulnerability as a key risk factor, and ensure that the population has ‘surplus health’ to avoid excess deaths during a pandemic. Lastly, he will explore how COVID-19 showed us that narrow biomedical approaches to pandemics limit the ability to provide healthcare, and why it is important to build a pandemic approach based on equity, trust in government institutions, and reduction of social determinants of health.