Comment on "Sustainable Health Financing for COVID‐19 Preparedness and Response in Asia and the Pacific".

Keywords: I14; I15; I18 EN I14 I15 I18 157 158 2 01/05/22 20220101 NES 220101 Kwon and Kim (2022) make a useful contribution to understanding differences among various Asian and Pacific countries to the COVID-19 pandemic, but more importantly, the paper points out the importance of maintaining adequate funding and marshaling large scale health care resources to combat pandemics by quickly identifying and treating cases, organizing care, case tracing, sharing information, and identifying and addressing system shortcomings. Kwon and Kim highlight the early evidence from the pandemic war in the first year of COVID-19, but the battle has shifted, with the arrival of improved testing and multiple vaccines on the encouraging side, but virulent and highly infective new variants on the discouraging side. As noted by Kwon and Kim, various Asian-Pacific countries were better prepared and quicker to act than many of the higher-income countries. [Extracted from the article]