What can health systems learn from COVID-19?

The COVID-19 pandemic has spotted the areas of improvements of the healthcare systems. The first lesson is to invest more in prevention. The second lesson concerns empowering primary and community care. The third lesson regards the psychological effects of the pandemic on the healthcare personnel. The fourth lesson concerns investing in digital health. and the fifth lesson concerns the study designs to generate clinical evidence. COVID-19 has caused the worst economic crisis ever of the planet. But it also exposed the fundamental relationship between the human component, production and technology. As more and more people were quarantined, activity slowly ground to a halt, sector after sector. Without people, or better to say, without healthy people, society and the economy cannot work. Healthcare systems are meant to guarantee health protection and health improvements but too often are under-financed, under-staffed, stressed and are placed at the bottom of the political agenda. The Next-Generation recovery fund released by the EU is very generous and represents a great occasion we hope Member States will not waste. COVID-19 also showed that in a global world, where people can travel from one side to another side of the planet in less than 36 hours, health emergencies must be tackled through global, harmonized and coordinated efforts. The role of the European Union in these cases is of paramount importance and would need to be further strengthened in order to improve the equity of access to effective technologies to all EU citizens (e.g.procurement of future COVID-19 vaccines);to quickly help orient Member States' actions by evaluating data and evidence whenever can be representative and applicable to different contexts (e.g.use of masks, contact tracing systems);and to propose coordinated policies vis- -vis other jurisdictions and international organizations.