ABSTRACT
This chapter concludes a comparative study of ten nations’ responses to the emerging public health threat from the novel coronavirus, SARSCoV2, that spread across the world during the first six months of 2020. The study focused on cognition as the key function that structures action in response to an emerging threat, leading to collective cognition that enables collective action. Based on case studies of how ten nations responded to COVID-19 in January–June 2020, five key observations are drawn: (1) collective cognition occurs at different scales; (2) learning by observation versus experience leads to different consequences in practice; (3) information technology provides benefits in monitoring health conditions, but risks to privacy; (4) groups, states, and nations learn at different rates and adapt to the same threat with different levels of urgency and action; and (5) modeling strategies of risk reduction leads to discovery of new methods to mitigate risk. The study concludes that three steps are essential to develop a learning model for global health: (1) strengthen the institution of the WHO, ensured through an independent source of funding; (2) establish an international knowledge base with open access; and (3) use advances in information technology and communications to support global learning.
