Britain Plans To Build An Early Warning System To Anticipate Future Pandemic

COVID-19 tests during the coronavirus pandemic in the UK. (Wikimedia Commons/British Army)

JAKARTA - An early detection system backed by billions of investments will help protect Britain from the pandemic in the future.

Radar biothreats will warn about the risks of developing disease and biological weapons, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden said on Monday.

Since COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, in 2019, this virus has killed more than 6.9 million people and there are about 767 million cases.

The new system will bring together data from all governments and trusted sources, to provide scientists and political leaders with a comprehensive picture of biological threats or crises that are developing.

This is part of a new government's biological security strategy supported by an investment of 1.5 billion (IDR 28,053,075,000,000) annually.

"COVID is the biggest challenge of peace times in a century and we must be diligent in preparing to face future threats on a scale like this," Dowden said.

"This plan and our investment of 1.5 billion per year put us in a strong position to defeat future biological threats - from disease to biological weapons and antimicrobial resistance," he explained.

"This is a strong and ambitious approach - an approach that takes advantage of British researchers and scientists as well as mobilizing the management capabilities of our world-class crisis to protect the British people," Dowden said.

Biological security strategies aim to use lessons from COVID-19 to understand, detect, prevent, or respond to biological threats including the new pandemic and biological weapons.

Chief scientific adviser to the government Prof. Dame Angela McLean said: "The Covid-19 pandemic shows how important it is to have a coherent plan to protect Britain from a variety of increasingly complex biological risks and build Britain's power in vaccine research and development and biological science".

"The new biological security strategy will make an important contribution to our preparedness," he said.