Excellency, Dr Lo Veasnakiry, Secretary of State, Ministry of Health
Excellency, Dr Hok Kimcheng, Director General for Health,
Excellencies, Directors, Provincial Health Departments
Excellencies, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
I am so pleased to be with you here today and would like to thank H.E. Dr. Kiry for his strong leadership.
Last year, Cambodia showed true leadership and success in responding to COVID-19. This workshop shows that your commitment and dedication will continue in 2021.
We have learned so much from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the biggest lessons has been that preparedness always pays off.
As you will remember, Cambodia activated its COVID-19 response in January last year. Cambodia succeeded in suppressing the virus. As of 15 February, only 479 cases have been reported, with no deaths.
Cambodia developed its Master Plan for COVID-19 in March 2020 to prepare for large scale community transmission, and minimize the health and socioeconomic impact of COVID-19.
Cambodia was able to achieve this success for many reasons. I want to highlight five:
- Strong government leadership and an effective whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach
- Past investment in the health security system as guided by the Asia Pacific Strategy for Emerging Diseases and Public Health Emergencies (APSED III)
- Strong public communication and community engagement
- Solidarity and international collaboration
- Cambodian culture and social context
As a result, Cambodia is much better prepared to respond to large-scale community transmission. For example:
- Almost 3,000 rapid response team members who are trained public health staff have been mobilized to form the frontline of the response.
- Daily testing capacity at laboratories has increased from 500 samples per day at the beginning of 2020 to more than 3000 per day now.
- Health-care workers are much more confident and better equipped to respond to COVID-19.
Everyone in this meeting contributed to this success. Congratulations to all of you. You have made a real difference.
Despite these achievements, COVID-19 remains a threat globally and in Cambodia. The pandemic will not be over anywhere until it is over everywhere. To date, more than 107 million cases of COVID-19 including 2.3 million deaths have been reported to WHO globally. COVID-19 does not respect borders. We have seen this again and again throughout the pandemic. We are seeing it now, as Cambodians return from Thailand, where there is an outbreak. This pandemic is far from over. And while Cambodia is much better prepared than before, we are not yet fully ready for largescale community transmission. Further, while it is good news that COVID-19 vaccination has already begun in Cambodia, we know that vaccines will not end the pandemic on their own.
These are the reasons why we must continue to invest in preparedness. We prepare today so we have no regrets tomorrow.
We face several challenges to full preparedness. Further efforts need to be made to improve public compliance with public health advice, build human resource capacity, and ensure the special protection of vulnerable groups. The updated version of the Master Plan addresses these gaps, building on the progress that was made last year in response to imported cases, clusters of cases and localized community transmission.
The Master Plan also emphasizes the importance of strengthening local preparedness. As Cambodia and other countries have seen new cases and localized community transmission, we have recognized that local governance, surveillance, community engagement, and public health measures at the sub-national level are crucial, as they allow us to respond with targeted, localized interventions. This helps to minimize economic and social disruption, while keeping the epidemic under control.
Local preparedness is essential for responding to largescale community transmission. That’s the reason we’re here today. In the next few days, we will develop Provincial Preparedness and Action Plans for COVID-19 and Beyond. These provincial action plans will provide a clear roadmap on key priority areas, and will integrate our knowledge and lessons learned over the last year, to be prepared for largescale community transmission.
During the pandemic, each province has faced its own set of challenges. It is encouraging to see how provincial leaders have innovatively applied COVID-19 preventive measures to their own contexts, while also continuing to provide other essential health services.
The provincial preparedness and action plans will build on these successes and help to strengthen leadership, incident management and inter-ministerial and intersectoral coordination, multisource surveillance, laboratories, healthcare readiness and care pathways, risk communication and community engagement, non-pharmaceutical interventions, points of entry and border measures, and operational logistics.
Our work to build these provincial preparedness and action plans will not only improve future response to COVID-19 outbreaks. It will also strengthen the health system, enhance collaboration beyond health, and improve our response to other health emergencies such as flooding.
Local preparedness needs to prioritize the needs of those most vulnerable, and adopt a gender, equity and human rights lens of analysis to ensure both the effectiveness and the equity of response efforts. Migrant workers, one of the groups vulnerable to COVID-19, will be protected through the quarantine and other health services provided at the border and their home provinces to ensure their safe and healthy return.
To conclude, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a simple, important lesson: Health is an investment, rather than a cost. The devastating impact of the pandemic is a reminder of the need for us to continue to strengthen our health system, making the right investments now for a safer and healthier future.
WHO is fully committed to continuing to work closely with the Royal Government of Cambodia, especially the Ministry of Health, provincial health departments, and partners in preparing for and responding to COVID-19 and beyond.
Our actions today will be in the history books of tomorrow. We must work together in solidarity to strengthen our health systems to reduce COVID-19 transmission and ensure social and economic wellbeing For the Future.
Thank you.