Partners In Health, faculty help communities respond to COVID-19
Harvard Medical School faculty members and their colleagues at Partners In Health (PIH) are collaborating with local communities and national governments to help prepare some of the world’s most vulnerable people for the COVID-19 pandemic. PIH is launching a comprehensive effort to support this response across its network of supported countries to: contain and control the spread of the virus, ensure that patients are provided with dignified care, and demonstrate to the world what aggressive action in vulnerable settings can achieve. While the impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on developed nations including the U.S., Italy, and China, it’s an all-too familiar progression in the places where PIH works, which have faced devastating earthquakes and hurricanes, massive outbreaks of Ebola and cholera, and simmering epidemics of HIV and tuberculosis in recent years, all in the context of crushing poverty and fractured or nonexistent health systems. Paul Farmer, the Kolokotrones University Professor...