BOSTON: I am a former FDA COO and Harvard faculty member, and a decades-long infectious disease spread risk management expert. (It’s the rate, depth, and breadth of “spread” that counts.) At the FDA, I co-led its last major internal reform. At Harvard, I taught policy, law, and management, including risk management.
I know many of you know these facts. Still, I want to reinforce your thinking on the opportunity to serve your enterprise and the nation in controlling the spread of current—and possibly far more significant, future—deadly infectious diseases. The opportunity is immense because the need is tremendous.
To help you prepare for this service of “getting your house in order” and assisting others to do the same, here is the updated death data on one of the 24 diseases I have mentioned most often in my over 100 articles and posts.
During my earlier discussions, I spoke not only of the great need for Infectious Disease Safety Programs (like the well-known “fire safety programs” now ubiquitous worldwide) because of their absence but also because of their greater[1]than-fire danger from their vastly larger pace and breadth of spread.
I also spoke of Safely2Prosperity’s advanced digital platform. And how it will help critical infrastructure-related government agencies and businesses execute their crucial role in preparing, preventing, mitigating, and controlling infectious disease spread within their enterprises, throughout their county, within their state, and across our nation—and then around the world.
The disease I have spoken most often of is COVID-19, which, even though most laypersons and CEOs don’t know it, is still a roaring threat here in America and around the globe. But the concepts I explore also apply to some 24 other infectious diseases prevalent in the US and to a great extent worldwide.
In the US, there have been 1.2 Million deaths from this one disease. Perhaps as many as 40% of these people were avoidably killed. This is 100k more than I reported just a short time ago. These are still primarily elderly persons, so even though they mostly are parents and grandparents, their deaths attract little notice in the press.
Can you imagine if aircraft crashes in a single year produced even 1/10 this number of deaths? Or if 1/100th of the deaths involved children? Are we prepared for this possibility?
This is so even though the average American, including the average CEO, believes the pandemic is long gone. They think there is no CDC-defined Tripledemic (of COVID-19 + the Flu + RSV) right now, and, at the very least, the likely next wave of the COVID-19 pathogen every fall for many years to come, just like there is for the Flu, is a fantasy to them.
