ABSTRACT
The robustness of national health services and the overall health of populations were further risk factors for countries in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The health of a population can be defined in terms of the prevalence of specific illness or ill-health risk conditions. Among those that were medically found to be important to COVID-19 risks were obesity, diabetes, cancer, hypertension and heart disease and a number of other conditions. While there were medical reasons why these characteristics of individuals were known to present risk factors for serious illness from COVID-19, modelling work was conducted to clarify how much impact these health factors had. The robustness of health systems was also potentially important to COVID-19 death rates because of the volume and quality of essential and critical care that was available to those infected by this disease. What became clear over time during the pandemic was that even nations with well-resourced health services were often caught napping by this new disease and were ill-prepared in respect of the availability of specific resources. Of course, lessons were learned after the fact, but there was evidence that some mitigating measures were already known to be effective in the management of pandemics before the 2020 global health crisis and yet seemed to have been ignored by governments.
