Pandemic NPIs
Improving NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) such as PPE and air filtration systems to control dangerous pathogens
This profile is tailored towards students studying biological sciences, engineering and health sciences, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
Pandemic outbreaks have caused enormous loss of life. Global excess mortality due to COVID-19 was at least 17 million in 2020 and 2021, with more deaths continuing to this day. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed between 1% and 5.4% of the global population. Smaller influenza pandemics such as those in 1957 and 1968 killed 1-4 million people worldwide, and demonstrate that the emergence of new respiratory viruses is a routine event. Pandemics also harm the quality of people’s lives; for example, the COVID-19 global recession is the deepest since the end of WWII according to the Brookings Institute. The Institute for Progress has estimated that COVID-19 cost the USA between 7 and 16 trillion dollars worth of health and economic damage, over and above the value of lives lost.
We need technological improvements and improvements to governance and implementation to better respond to pandemics and other biological threats. Natural pandemics more severe than COVID-19, or anthropogenic pandemics caused by engineered pathogens, could cause huge disruption to global civilisation and humanity’s future, possibly even the collapse of critical infrastructure and global civilization.
Working on preventing these scenarios and mitigating them if they come to happen might, therefore, be very valuable. There are various interventions that can reduce the risk of a dangerous pathogen emerging, such as improving safety in laboratories working with dangerous pathogens and improving environmental surveillance to detect dangerous pathogens.
However, once a pathogen is beginning to spread, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as distancing and PPE are likely to be the first line of defense, before medical interventions can be deployed. Non-pharmaceutical interventions also have the advantage of having less dual-use potential than medical interventions, meaning it seems unlikely that advances made in this area of research could be used to do harm. This profile explores how behaviour change, changes to indoor environments and various non-medical technologies can control the spread of infectious disease.
Contributors: This profile was last updated 5/1/2023. Thanks to Elika Somani for helpful feedback on this profile. All errors remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
