Trading contact tracing efficiency for finding patient zero.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, identifying the origin of a pandemic remains a challenging task. The search for patient zero may benefit from the widely-used and well-established toolkit of contact tracing methods, although this possibility has not been explored to date. We fill this gap by investigating the prospect of performing the source detection task as part of the contact tracing process, i.e., the possibility of tuning the parameters of the process in order to pinpoint the origin of the infection. To this end, we perform simulations on temporal networks using a recent diffusion model that recreates the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that increasing the budget for contact tracing beyond a certain threshold can significantly improve the identification of infected individuals but has diminishing returns in terms of source detection. Moreover, disease variants of higher infectivity make it easier to find the source but harder to identify infected individuals. Finally, we unravel a seemingly-intrinsic trade-off between the use of contact tracing to either identify infected nodes or detect the source of infection. This trade-off suggests that focusing on the identification of patient zero may come at the expense of identifying infected individuals.

Sharing Power to Improve Population Health: Participatory Budgeting and Policy Making.

In Pierce County, Washington, 6 Communities of Focus face tough health disparities. To engage members of communities that have been marginalized for generations, Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department piloted participatory budgeting. Through this 5-step process, the health department and its partners make investments significant enough to bring community members to the table, codesign solutions, and put the final decision-making power to fund programs and services in their hands. Sharing power through this process is an innovative approach and has been adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic to build trust essential to resilience and recovery. After a series of successful projects bringing participatory budgeting to scale, the Public Health Centers for Excellence is piloting participatory policy making and disseminating both practices broadly.

Leveraging COVID-19 pandemic response for improved health system financing: Lessons from Ghana.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed health system funding challenges across many developing countries. The needed infrastructure to effectively respond to the pandemic was absent in many developing countries. This has resulted in policymakers resorting to various strategies to mobilise sufficient resources in response to the pandemic, especially in the early stages. This paper reviewed Ghana's efforts to mobilise domestic and external resources for the health sector in response to the pandemic. The paper also assessed lessons from these strategies and highlights how these lessons could be leveraged to sustain financing for the health sector. Using evidence from desk reviews, we demonstrate the existence of fiscal space through external sources, partnership with non-state actors, and effective public financial management (budget space). We also show that the COVID-19 pandemic presents an important momentum to drive future investment in health infrastructure across developing countries.