In January 2020, the severity of the coronavirus outbreak caught most people by surprise. Public attention was glued to terrorism. While the health risk to individuals received immediate attention, it took time for the media and authorities to recognise the wider societal consequences of the pandemic, including its impact on the health system. As Luka Biong Deng Kuol writes in a recent PRIO blog post on African responses:
COVID-19 has exposed serious cracks in systems of government, capacities of states and public policies. Importantly, it has underscored the need to revisit how security is perceived, planned, managed and delivered to the citizens. The coronavirus has shown that human security is less at risk of the threat from the build-up of a nuclear arsenal than by a pandemic that can hardly be fought by conventional weaponry.
This broader social and political focus is exactly the point of departure of National Risk Assessments (NRAs). Like vaccines, their purpose is to confront decision-makers with vulnerabilities to a country’s ‘immune system,’ thereby preventing or reducing future disasters. Reinforced by the fact that many all-hazard NRAs – like those of the UK, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark – identified a pandemic as the most serious type of risk to society, one might therefore expect calls for increasing the political role of NRAs in the years ahead.
