Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) deaths per million population in the countries of the West had often exceeded those in the countries of the East by factor of 100 by May 2021. In this paper, we refer to the West as represented by the United States plus the five most populous countries of Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom), and the East as the 15 countries in East Asia and Oceania that are members of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, RCEP (Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). This paper argues that currently available information points to the factors most responsible for the East-West divide. Warnings by early January 2020 about an atypical viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China, prompted rapid responses in many jurisdictions in East Asia. Publication of the virus's genome on 10 January 2020 provided essential information for making diagnostic tests and launching vaccine development. China's lockdown of Wuhan on 23 January 2020 provided a final, decisive signal of the danger of the new disease. By late March 2020, China had fully controlled its epidemic, and many other RCEP countries had taken early and decisive measures, including restrictions on travel, that aborted serious outcomes. Inaction during the critical month of February 2020 in the United States and most other Western countries allowed the disease to take hold and spread. In both the East and the West, stringent population-wide non-pharmaceutical interventions were widely implemented at great cost to societies, economies, and school systems. Without these measures, the outcomes could have been even worse. Most countries in the East also implemented tightly focused policies to isolate infectious individuals. Even today, most countries in the West allow infectious individuals to mingle with their families, coworkers, and communities. Much of the East-West divide plausibly results from failure in the West to implement the basic public health policies of early action and the isolation of infectious individuals. Widespread immunization in some RCEP and high-income countries will soon attenuate their outbreaks, while the slow rollout of vaccines in lower income countries is replacing the East-West divide in outcomes with a North-South one. The South is thus replacing the West as the breeding ground for more dangerous variants as exemplified by the highly contagious Delta variant, which may undermine hitherto successful control strategies in many countries.
This paper analyses the effect of income and education on life expectancy and mortality rates among the elderly in 33 countries for the period 1960-92 and assesses how that relationship has changed over time as a result of technical progress. Our outcome variables are life expectancy at age 60 and the probability of dying between age 60 and age 80 for both males and females. The data are from vital-registration based life tables published by national statistical offices for several years during this period. We estimate regressions with determinants that include GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power), education and time (as a proxy for technical progress). As the available measure of education failed to account for variation in life expectancy or mortality at age 60, our reported analyses focus on a simplified model with only income and time as predictors. The results indicate that, controlling for income, mortality rates among the elderly have declined considerably over the past three decades. We also find that poverty (as measured by low average income levels) explains some of the variation in both life expectancy at age 60 and mortality rates among the elderly across the countries in the sample. The explained amount of variation is more substantial for females than for males. While poverty does adversely affect mortality rates among the elderly (and the strength of this effect is estimated to be increasing over time), technical progress appears far more important in the period following 1960. Predicted female life expectancy (at age 60) in 1960 at the mean income level in 1960 was, for example 18.8 years; income growth to 1992 increased this by an estimated 0.7 years, whereas technical progress increased it by 2.0 years. We then use the estimated regression results to compare country performance on life expectancy of the elderly, controlling for levels of poverty (or income), and to assess how performance has varied over time. High performing countries, on female life expectancy at age 60, for the period around 1990, included Chile (1.0 years longer life expectancy), China (1.7 years longer), France (2.0 years longer), Japan (1.9 years longer), and Switzerland (1.3 years longer). Poorly performing countries included Denmark (1.1 years shorter life expectancy than predicted from income), Hungary (1.4 years shorter), Iceland (1.2 years shorter), Malaysia (1.6 years shorter), and Trinidad and Tobago (3.9 years shorter). Chile and Switzerland registered major improvements in relative performance over this period; Norway, Taiwan and the USA, in contrast showed major declines in performance between 1980 and the early 1990s.
The World Bank is publishing nine volumes of Disease Control Priorities, 3rd edition (DCP3) between 2015 and 2018. Volume 9, Improving Health and Reducing Poverty, summarises the main messages from all the volumes and contains cross-cutting analyses. This Review draws on all nine volumes to convey conclusions. The analysis in DCP3 is built around 21 essential packages that were developed in the nine volumes. Each essential package addresses the concerns of a major professional community (eg, child health or surgery) and contains a mix of intersectoral policies and health-sector interventions. 71 intersectoral prevention policies were identified in total, 29 of which are priorities for early introduction. Interventions within the health sector were grouped onto five platforms (population based, community level, health centre, first-level hospital, and referral hospital). DCP3 defines a model concept of essential universal health coverage (EUHC) with 218 interventions that provides a starting point for country-specific analysis of priorities. Assuming steady-state implementation by 2030, EUHC in lower-middle-income countries would reduce premature deaths by an estimated 4·2 million per year. Estimated total costs prove substantial: about 9·1% of (current) gross national income (GNI) in low-income countries and 5·2% of GNI in lower-middle-income countries. Financing provision of continuing intervention against chronic conditions accounts for about half of estimated incremental costs. For lower-middle-income countries, the mortality reduction from implementing the EUHC can only reach about half the mortality reduction in non-communicable diseases called for by the Sustainable Development Goals. Full achievement will require increased investment or sustained intersectoral action, and actions by finance ministries to tax smoking and polluting emissions and to reduce or eliminate (often large) subsidies on fossil fuels appear of central importance. DCP3 is intended to be a model starting point for analyses at the country level, but country-specific cost structures, epidemiological needs, and national priorities will generally lead to definitions of EUHC that differ from country to country and from the model in this Review. DCP3 is particularly relevant as achievement of EUHC relies increasingly on greater domestic finance, with global developmental assistance in health focusing more on global public goods. In addition to assessing effects on mortality, DCP3 looked at outcomes of EUHC not encompassed by the disability-adjusted life-year metric and related cost-effectiveness analyses. The other objectives included financial protection (potentially better provided upstream by keeping people out of the hospital rather than downstream by paying their hospital bills for them), stillbirths averted, palliative care, contraception, and child physical and intellectual growth. The first 1000 days after conception are highly important for child development, but the next 7000 days are likewise important and often neglected.