Public Health Assurance in the COVID-19 Era: Current Challenges and Future Prospects

If there is no any other time the subject of public health assurance should be discussed and taken more seriously, it is now, the COVID-19 ERA. The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan province of China in December, 2019 has had tremendous impacts on various aspects of life across the world, including the health, economy, education and scientific research. Historically, public health has been a silver bullet for combating infectious diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic however, has further brought the need for public health assurance under global spotlight. Public Health Assurance covers those activities that deal with making sure people's health needs are safely and effectively met. Key areas of public health assurance include: 1) Enforcing laws and regulations that protect environmental health and ensure safety, 2) Linking people to needed environmental health services and assure the provision of environmental health services when otherwise unavailable, 3) Assuring a competent environmental health workforce, 4) Evaluating effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of personal and population-based environmental health services and 5) Researching for new insights and innovative solutions to environmental health problems. Challenges facing public health assurance include: 1) Inability to adequately perform the crucial public health tasks of evaluation, policy creation, and service assurance, 2) haphazard decision-making without the appropriate information and understanding, 3) Inequities in service provision and the advantages of public health, 4) Limitations on effective leadership, such as inadequate ties with the medical community and poor communication between the technical and political sides of decisions, inadequate creation of the knowledge required to address the full spectrum of public health demands, 6) Inadequate funding to support the delivery of public health services, and 7) public health workforce is understaffed and unequipped to meet the needs of local communities. COVID-19 has been and remains an unprecedented global crisis and public health systems have put tremendous efforts to withstand the pandemic with public health assurance.  _KEY WORDS: COVID-19, Public Health Assurance, Challenges, Prospects_