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The 2003 global outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was an abrupt reminder that infectious diseases pose a continuing threat to human health. In 1967, U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart declared “it was time to close the book on infectious diseases” (Garrett, 1994, citing W.H. Stewart, “A Mandate for State Action,” presented at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, Washington, DC, December 4, 1967). In the latter half of the twentieth century, many shared this bold view that medical science had vanquished infectious disease. As a result, public health struggled to remain relevant in the face of advances in pharmaceuticals, surgery, genetics and other areas that were becoming increasingly dominant in the quest to extend and enhance human life. SARS forced many to rethink the significance of public health and the crisis, though relatively short-lived, (for commentary on the disparities between the responses to HIV and SARS, see e.g. Altman (2003)) underscored the need to rebuild public health capacity that had been allowed to slip down the health system priority list.

Introduction − Covid-19, which first emerged in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China, in January 2020, with an unknown source, spread to all countries of the world very quickly and caused the death of over two million people world-wide. This ever-increasing global need for health care has created a radical transformation in terms of not only in health care, but also in all public services. Transportation services for the transfer of patients to health institutions, education services due to the dangers of face-to-face training, justice services due to the postponement of non-urgent court proceedings, security services in terms of restriction sanctions and all public services in general due to the disruption of access to public services due to flexible working hours applied to public personnel has entered into an unplanned provision.

Purpose: The aim of this chapter is to identify the problems that arise in the provision of public goods and services due to the global epidemic of Covid-19, and to bring a new interpretation to the theoretical discussions about the optimal delivery level of public services when there is a situation of communicable disease.

Methodology: The principles of public goods and service provision of G20 countries, Covid-19 mortality rates, indicators of the well-being of healthcare delivery such as the number of bed and personnel, the type and number of devices used to diagnose the Covid disease, and the public service restrictions taken to eliminate Covid-19, have been evaluated by employing descriptive analysis. In order to prevent income and advanced levels from becoming distinctive features, G20 countries with similar income and development levels were selected for this research.

Findings: Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a distortion in the preference of provision of almost all public goods, and it has been observed that the delivery level of public services affects each other since all are linked like a chain. Failure to achieve what is expected from international organizations, which should be in a regulatory position in this regard, has increased concerns about the optimal presentation level of all public goods, especially health, in the future. As long as there is a global pandemic and countries do not take effective measures, a bad second best position that is far from optimal results but provides that instant solutions.

The role of the school nurse has evolved. It has expanded from administering first aid and promoting hand washing to key participation in program planning for health and educational outcomes for the school-aged child. Nurses provide leadership in promoting a healthy and safe school environment, case management of chronically ill children, collaboration between family and school, and referral to essential community resources. Additionally, the school nurse is a valuable resource on the multidisciplinary special education team. The school nurse is the health care expert in the school and is in a unique position to meet the actual and potential needs of all students – including those with special needs.

The modern human rights movement, like American bioethics, was born from the devastation of World War II. The multinational trial of the major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg following World War II was held on the premise that there is a higher law of humanity (derived from natural law rules based on an understanding of the essential nature of humans), and that individuals may be properly tried for violating that law. Universal criminal law includes crimes against humanity, such as murder, genocide, torture, and slavery. Obeying the orders of superiors is no defense: the state cannot shield its agents from prosecution for crimes against humanity.

Governments in Southeast Asia have introduced and enforced harsh legal measures to stem the spread of COVID-19. These measures are disproportionate to the crisis and disregard fundamental human rights. Against this backdrop, public trust in government among Southeast Asians nevertheless remains relatively high – paradoxically, people living in authoritarian regimes tend to trust their governments more compared to people living in democratic regimes. The chapter examines the impacts that anti-COVID-19 legal measures have left on the protection of human rights and the seemingly paradoxical divorce between public trust and the diminished respect for fundamental human rights. Based on this examination, this chapter also proposes elements that any global treaty for future pandemic response must include in order to ensure the protection of human rights.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

Several emergency public health issues have a tremendous impact on and rely upon close coordination with law enforcement officials. Most interactions involve law enforcement personnel providing security, crowd control, and/or traffic control during public health related incidents. However, as varied chemical and biological threats have emerged over the years, this interaction has increased to include joint investigations between the two disciplines. Certain biological threats, such as pandemics, pose direct threats to the law enforcement agency operations. Understanding the role of public health in emergencies, the overlapping missions, and the threats at all levels allows law enforcement professionals to better prepare themselves and their organizations for coordinating operations and maintaining continuity of law enforcement services.

We suggest that globalization, a process that fosters greater interdependence and mutual awareness among actors around the world in their economic, political, social, and cultural interactions, will also decrease the social distance among them and thus increase individuals' propensities to cooperate with distal others. We demonstrate in a multi-country public goods experiment that among the four domains of individual participation in globalization, economic participation in globalization has the least effect in prompting cooperation. Conversely, the other three domains of globalization have strong effects on individual cooperation, and this is robust to different specifications of the econometric model.

Public health programs facilitate access to resources that not only provide individuals’ options but also often foreclose individual preference through prescriptive requirements. This chapter takes two disparate cases from public health – vaccines and family planning –that reveal patterns of inequality in who has access to individual choice and who requires state support to exercise choice. Looking specifically at dynamics of funding and compulsion, this chapter elucidates how reliance on the rhetoric of individual choice as an expression of freedom rewards those with the greatest access to resources and fails to make sure that all members of the community have the resources to shape their own outcomes or to make sure collective health is protected.