Preparing for future threats
For example, research by health scientist Doret de Rooij shows that not only the medical perspective is needed in infectious disease control, but also the business, organisational and safety perspective must be taken into account from the start. There must be coherence between the preparation of professionals and teams, within their organisations and between these organisations at a border location. This is currently insufficient.
Cooperation
In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that crisis plans must facilitate flexibility in the response. Therefor not only good preparation in advance is important, but this must go hand in hand with being able to learn and adapt in time to new, complex crisis situations. It also appears that there was insufficient cooperation between countries and their border locations, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Policies between countries, and especially within the European Schengen zone, varied widely. This often made it ineffective. That the policies differed so much is remarkable, since countries are directly dependent on each other's border policies.
Better safe than sorry
Within Europe, but also beyond, preventing the spread of infectious diseases between countries must be done jointly. Countries should focus more on joint research, development and policy to be effective. This is now being worked on in Europe. In addition, it is important to realise that it is impossible to be prepared for all possible crisis situations of the future.
Precisely for this reason, we must now learn to respond to a possible crisis in a timely manner. The run-up to a crisis must be used to adapt preparations specifically and in time to the situation. And investments must be made in learning methods to continue learning and changing during a period of crisis. Finally, cooperation between the different parties from different sectors at ports, airports or border crossings must be optimised so that it can be very effective during the crisis.