One year after the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic, the Order of Malta together with the British think tank Forward Thinking, launches a report on the main findings emerging from cycle of webinars held throughout 2020 and 2021 with health specialists and policy makers from all over the world. The project “Doctor to Doctor” was designed in March 2020 in the wake of the health emergency to create a learning platform for experts to enable a better understanding of the Coronavirus, as infections were rapidly spreading across the globe with numbers of deaths soaring and hospital intensive care units under unforeseeable mounting pressure.
While initial preventative measures were experimented, with the implementation of the first lockdowns, it became clear that the whole world was facing an unprecedented threat that no country could endure individually. We live in a connected world: the disease which first manifested in China soon spread through Europe, starting from Italy, and like a domino effect in little time reached all continents.
The Doctor-to-Doctor project soon became a valuable tool to unravel what was by then known about the virus, its transmission, and the management of Covid 19 patients. It also served as a shared platform to discuss and exchanges empirical findings to allow countries with few cases- in particular in the Middle East region – to learn and be better prepared drawing from the experience of other countries who had faced the emergency at an earlier stage.
“Through its wide diplomatic network, the Foreign Department of the Order of Malta’s government, in partnership with Forward Thinking, was able to engage high representatives of different national health authorities to join in productive and insightful online debates, where medical expert – such as immunologists, virologists, emergency doctors, and health policy makers- could share their experiences with the aim of advancing globally the understanding of Covid 19” said the Grand Chancellor of the Order of Malta, Albrecht Boeselager.
Some 150 health experts from Australia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Yemen and the World Health Organisation have participated in the ongoing dialogue.
Furthermore, the Order of Malta has also organized a segment, called “Doctores en la Red” (Doctors on the Web), specifically for Latin American countries. Altogether four webinars have been organized, , involving a total of 16 countries, 13 of which were Latin American: Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, as well as Spain, the United States and Italy.
The latest webinars have focused particularly on the advancements made in the science of vaccines and the roll out of the first ones on the market. The report, launched today, is divided into four section: the history of the initiative and how it was developed, the key finding with an in-depth summary of the differences countries experience of Covid 19, and a brief overview of possible future areas of discussion.
