ABSTRACT
From a public health perspective, COVID-19 stretched national health systems to their limits. All countries and territories grappled with the same slate of fundamental public health challenges: testing, tracing, and isolation of potentially exposed or infected individuals, suppressing transmission in the general population, protecting healthcare workers, preventing patients’ progression to severe disease or death, keeping up with the latest developments in drug, treatment and vaccine technologies, and maintaining delivery of essential health and social care services. For a pandemic occurring in the modern era of globalisation, information exchange, and movement of persons and goods, a main challenge for national governments was what strategy to choose to manage COVID-19. COVID-19 was a test of the capacity of different systems to cope with a major crisis. The Secretariat acted as an information clearinghouse for programmes relating to COVID-19, but perhaps more important was the role of the Commonwealth in promoting and upholding norms of international cooperation.
