Learning from tuberculosis: COVID-19 highlights the need for more robust infection control policy

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) represents an unprecedented challenge in modern public health practice. Having spread to over 180 countries and having affected millions of individuals, the COVID-19 pandemic requires a coordinated, effective response without sacrifice to quality or availability of other essential medical services [1]. This rapidly-moving pandemic has laid bare the importance of effective surveillance, quarantine, testing and diagnosis, contact tracing and hospital infection prevention and control measures. Certain countries, including Singapore, have effectively contained community spread of the virus through early and broad quarantine, testing and contact tracing measures [2-4]. In countries like Italy and Spain – where responses were slower, narrower in focus and less consistently implemented – COVID-19 transmission has spread widely in the community, and responses have shifted from containment to mitigation [4,5]. In these countries where containment measures have failed, health systems must plan to ration life-saving medical equipment like mechanical ventilators [6-8]. As COVID-19 spreads to more countries daily, governments begin to prepare for community spread and start to impose travel restrictions, quarantines and physical distancing measures in an effort to “flatten the curve” and to minimize health system strain [9,10].