A Holistic View of Health Infrastructure Resilience Before and After COVID-19

Large-scale events such as COVID-19 show that there are situations that can lead to huge stress on health infrastructuresystems (HIS). The pandemic reveals that it is very difficult to protect HIS from all kinds of possible hazards. Considerthe trend of these types of viruses, such as N1H1, SARS and Ebola. These types of hazards could be more frequentand extreme in the future. They can be unpredictable and spread rapidly; hence, it is hard to find an effective mitigationstrategy to completely protect society and its important HIS. Therefore, an often raised central question is what weshould do if we cannot protect HIS from these types of hazards. To answer this question, the focus should move fromHIS protection to HIS resilience. Our experience with COVID-19 has revealed that there is no general agreementon how HIS resilience should be measured, assessed and appropriately enhanced. This paper will discuss howthe resilience concept will help decision- and policy-makers to have a clear view of HIS performance before, duringand after the disaster. It employs an easy-to-use and applicable methodology for HIS assessment and evaluation.Thereafter, its application is illustrated by a real case study.Level of evidence: V