Dear friends and colleagues, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. My name is Pat Turner, and I'm president of the World Veterinary Association. And on behalf of the WVA, I would like to welcome you to our fall forum on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global veterinary profession, which is being conducted in collaboration with the webinar vet.

Well, what a year 2020 has been so far. Had any of us looked into our crystal balls at the beginning of 2020, I don't think any of us could have foreseen what this year was to hold for the veterinary profession and our communities around the world. And yet through this very challenging time, veterinarians have demonstrated their ability to cope, adjust, and adapt, and to continue in their role as leaders of animal health and welfare and public health, while at the same time safeguarding the health of our teams, clients, families, and ourselves.

We've also seen veterinary associations around the world reach out to provide more informal engagement and connections to support their members to ensure that veterinarians continue to feel valued as members of our professional community. The disruption in our world caused by the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for the profession to seek new ways of practising to meet the needs of our clients, patients, and communities. Some of these technologies were with us previously, but the immediacy of the pandemic has encouraged the veterinary community to adapt more quickly than might have been the case.

Veterinarians have responded to this opportunity with agility and flexibility, rethinking what veterinary practise can be and how work can be conducted. We also can't forget the impact of the pandemic to date on our future colleagues, the global body of veterinary students. Many students have experienced disruptions in their studies and other challenges in being able to complete applied aspects of their clinical training.

I know that veterinary educators have been working incredibly hard to accommodate course content and materials to offer new hybrid online and in-person formats to ensure that veterinary students can continue to receive high quality training. But we shouldn't forget that not all students have access to internet and other tools such as tablets and computers needed to complete their studies online. The WVA's intention in holding this forum today was to share information about how veterinary professionals and students around the world have been able to adapt to this new world and way of working, to see how we can learn from each other and from our successes and failures.

The format for today will include several short talks by veterinary leaders followed by a panel session in which our speakers will be joined by several other experts to address questions about the impact of the pandemic on the veterinary profession and moving forward. I'm also excited that we will be announcing the winners of the 2020 WVAIA Global Animal Welfare Awards during a short break between the speaker and the panel sessions. I hope that this video announcement inspires you and reminds you about the dedication and passion that veterinary professionals and students bring to their work each day.

With that, I'd like to invite Doctor Anthony Chadwick of the webinar vet to introduce our first speaker for this session today. Thank you, Patricia, and as I would just reiterate, do stick around during the interval to hear about the very special. Awards, the, the animal welfare Awards, that we will be, broadcasting to you.

Our first speaker is Luis Pedro Carmo, who is going to speak about the role of the veterinary sector in the COVID-19 pandemic response. Together with a large international consortium, Luis has tried to document the role of the veterinary sector in the pandemic responses and understand how we can establish stronger collaborations with the public health sector. This is an ongoing study, and Luis will be explaining some of the results that he's already received.

Luis is a veterinary surgeon. He qualified from the University of Porto in 2013 and went to Switzerland to do a PhD in antimicrobial use and resistance. He's presently working at the University of Bern in the Veterinary Public Health Institute.

Louis, it's over to you. I'm really looking forward to the presentation. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Anthony for the, for the kind introduction and thank you as well to the organisers for the opportunity to present our work here. As stated, I'll present today our project on the role of the vet sector in the pandemic responses, and I should warn you, right away that this is still, an ongoing, study. And and the results I'll present here today are preliminary.

So why, why did we start this? Already in the beginning of the pandemic, we read on the news about, veterinarians donating PPE or ventilators to support hospitals. There was also this news from the Faroe Islands about the vet scientist that was praised for adapting his lab to test for COVID-19 in in humans, and actually, Also ourselves at the Veterinary Public Health Institute, we were recruited by the Federal Office of Public Health to work on on COVID data.

We, we analysed data and we provided weekly reports to the authorities and we also generated information that they deemed necessary to answer questions from journalists or even for their decision making process. So, this made us wonder whether the vet sector was playing a preeminent role in the COVID-19 responses, and with that in mind, we initiated this projects aiming to document the role of the veterinary sector in the COVID-19 responses worldwide. Also to explore the roles and the relationships that have been formed during this outbreak.

And lastly, to identify ways to sustain these relationships and build new ones to deal, pardon me, to deal with future human, animal, or one health crisis. So we deemed the questionnaire the most appropriate way to to attain our goals. We prepared it in Microsoft forms and we really made an effort to keep it as simple as possible.

We asked participants some general information about themselves, like the country of residents or their field of work. Afterwards, we also asked them to list up to 3 activities where the vet sector provided assistance during the pandemic. We also, ask them if there were other ways in which vets could have collaborated, and finally, how can we improve the collaboration between the animal health and the public health sectors.

We pre-tested, the, the questionnaire, we adapt it accordingly to the feedback and we start disseminating it. So we, we targeted the populations that we thought would know better about the involvement of vets and the and response activities. So we mainly target vets and researchers or practitioners working between fields, but we did not exclude other participants, like for instance from the public health or the environmental health fields because they might be able to answer our questions too.

And we try to go wide rather than than deep. What I mean is that we wanted to have a global overview and not really to be representative at the country level. So with this in mind, we used regional, national, and international networks to disseminate the questionnaire.

We also contacted experts on the fields, and there was a little bit of snowball effects. So this means that it was an open link and we, we asked participants to share the link with other people that might be interested in, in collaborating. So most of the data management and descriptive statistics were done in R, but the core of the analysis is actually qualitative and for that reason, we use the MacQDA software.

And as mentioned, this is still ongoing, so the results are present once again, they are preliminary. So we got 1,488 replies. From these, about 200 were removed.

Which, left us with a final number of 11,290 replies to be analysed. And we translated the questionnaire into 9 languages. In the right side you see the distribution of replies per language, and we actually got two answers from languages that we did not translate the questionnaire to, but we, we have quite a big consortium and we, we were also able to translate those .

Those answers. So here you have the geographical distribution of the, of the answers and you can see that we have a nice global distribution with 113 countries represented. In red, you have the countries with that contributed with 1 to 10 ounces in green from 11 to 50 ounces and blue more than 50 ounces and grey areas mean that they, we did not obtain any, any survey completed.

And Germany, Brazil, India, Russia, and Nigeria were the countries with with more answers. In terms of field of work, most replies came from participants working in the animal health domain as expected. It's interesting to see that we caught about 200 answers from people that consider themselves one health workers.

And on the right side you can see in terms of employer most participants worked for the governments followed by the industry, and finally academia. As we mentioned, we asked participants about activities in which vets were involved in pandemic responses, and we did a content analysis with, with those answers. To develop the classification system, we had an initial meeting with our project members and we analysed together a sample of 75 answers.

And, We try to classify those answers into different activity groups. Afterwards, the rest of the answers were screened by by a single person. So, it's important to notice that this was not a static classification system.

We developed one a priori in our meeting, but that one kept on evolving while screening the answers. And these were the main categories we obtained at the end. And I'll go now in detail into each one of these categories.

So we'll start with the materials. It was one of the categories most frequently mentioned. It represents materials lend or donated.

As you can see here, we have PP ventilators, surgical equipment, lab materials, even sometimes lab, facilities. Of course, this this also represented an extra effort for the back sector and you can read that in this in this first quote. So reducing the use of disposable hygiene equipment to allow everything to go to human healthcare, or stopping all non-essential surgery to reduce the use of anaesthetics to save supplies for human healthcare.

And we have here Pardon me, we have here another example related to ivermectin while we were not sure about its potential treatment effects. in some countries they were saving stocks. Besides lending and donating materials, we also have the production of pharmaceuticals or disinfectants.

And lastly, we also had a couple of examples of vet schools that's borrowed their own facilities for for quarantine centres. The Vet sector also played a role in the diagnostics, testing not only animals but also humans, so sometimes even participating in the sampling procedure. And some respondents stated that fats were also involved in the quality assurance processes or in the assessment, validation or development of of tests used during the pandemic.

A considerable and and very relevant contribution in my opinion that the fact sector provided was in the communication and education aspects of during this health crisis. So you can read here in this quote, Veterinarian Association of Zambia allayed fears through publications which reassured the public that the farm animals were safe for handling and to meet was . Was was equally safe.

So that's played a role in public awareness in terms of risk communication about pets, animal products, and also in the in the prevention fields. And there was also a lot going on in terms of professional and scientific communications and lastly in terms of workforce training, as you can see in this, in this second quote. And this is of course just an example from the answers we, we obtained.

So vets are also involved in COVID research and providing expertise. By this we mean being involved in expert groups or being requested for specialised opinion in certain topics. This is just a selection.

Of, some areas that were mentioned in this survey. Epidemiology is one of them not only to assess the role of that animals might play, but also in the human epidemiology side. Other areas include disease control and surveillance, risk assessments, modelling, infectious diseases, etc.

And to me it was also interesting to see that vets have been using their expertise in social sciences research. And, finally, there are also vets involved, in, in vaccine development. So we also created a category named animal health action.

Some activities relate to the fact that vets were considered essential workers or some vets were considered essential workers during the epidemic peaks. Participants, considering that monitoring, animal health was, or maintaining animal health was a, was a duty and a contribution to the pandemic responses as well. Some felt that for keeping their business open, they were also at higher risk of getting infected and therefore, it also represented a significant contribution.

Same with the with the food security and we have here an example ensure that food of animal origin were available to consumers. There was a lockdown in the metropolis and the veterinary services were considered essential services, and all food animal origin were made available for civil strategic points. Animal health policy was also an activity that composed this category.

Several participants mentioned that vets created guidelines for businesses, for instance. Animal health surveillance was also mentioned not only in pets, but also in wildlife, like it was mentioned by by this participants. And finally, of course, outbreak investigation, namely in in mink as it is stated in, in this example from the Netherlands.

So public health action was another category and it encompasses a lot of activities. It really represents well the close contact or collaboration that animal health and the public health practitioners are having during the pandemic and fats were part of the workforce support. Including in the happy area, lab, and sometimes even clinical staff, as a backup or as a support.

And we have here a couple of quotes. So some I'll just read the first one, some veterinarians were members of the health reserve were called to participate in the sorting of patients in the telephone or even taking of nasopharyngeal swabs. So we already talked about call centres but we also have vets working in contact tracing or in control measure activities, for instance, assessing compliance of measures in restaurants or other businesses.

And that's also supported outbreak investigation as it is mentioned in this in this last quote. Amongst, of course, other activities like risk assessments or surveillance, etc. This is really just a selection of activities that, that I need.

So I also wanted to give you a glimpse of what we obtained with respect to how to improve collaboration between the animal and the public health sectors, but this is where we get into really, really, really preliminary results. We just looked at the sample of, of replies. And we went through them and it seemed that a lot of the participants highlighted the one health concept as the way to go.

So we then try to create this, this world cloud and This still needs to be refined, but you can see that indeed one health is one of the terms mentioned more often. And it's interesting to me that participants pointed one health as the concept to be embraced in order to foster collaboration. But as I said, these results need to be refined, and we hope to get further ideas on how to improve and maintain the relationships that were developed during the pandemic.

So, in conclusion, these are, preliminary findings, but it seems, that there was a wide inter intersectoral collaboration during the, the pandemic responses. There were new collaborations, emerging, and we now hope to understand how to maintain this in the long run. And as I, I mentioned, the one health concept seems to be widely advocated by the respondents.

So, I would like, to, to finalise by saying that this was really a global global effort. We have collaborators in every country, in every continent, pardon me, and I'd like to thank all the participants and all the institutions that help us disseminating this questionnaire. And thank you for your attention.

Thank you so much, Louis. That was splendid. It's, I think in 5 years it will be interesting to see with will there be a silver lining to COVID, which will be the increased collaboration of professionals in this one health way.

So thank you so much for that, really interesting to see what's, what's been happening and how we have been collaborating so well. Now I want to move on to our next presentation, which comes from Tombi Menda, who is the president of the Zambian Veterinary Association. And Tomby is going to be speaking about the African perspective on COVID COVID-19 and the effect on the vet vet fraternity in Africa.

Ntombi is a veterinary surgeon qualified from the University of Zambia, and then went on to do a master's in wild animal health at the Royal Veterinary College before doing a PhD at Louisiana State University in America. Ntombi at the moment is the head of department of clinical studies and is also a WVA counsellor for Africa. Really looking forward to your presentation, Ntombi, and it's over to you.

Thank you, Anthony for the introduction. I don't think I need to say anything more about myself. I'm just happy to be able to make this presentation, and it has been an effort from several different countries within Africa, coming together to give me information about this, this particular topic.

So, Africa has 55 countries, as most of you probably know, and these countries have different climatic regions, different kinds of medical facilities at different levels, and also different governance styles. The reason I bring this up is because the way COVID has been handled has been rather different depending on the country. So some countries have reported very high impact of COVID-19, and others have basically said it's not there.

But then also control and precautionary measures have been varied as well, from complete lockdowns to actually not implementing any measures or enforcing any measures at all. And the impact on the veterinary services, their provision as well as associated services has also been varied, and I'll try and highlight a few things as as we go along. The graph on the slide is depicting how COVID has affected Africa in general, from its inception, I think it started in Africa in February, and then, this is up to the 20th of October.

So you can see that there was a very big wave, somewhere between June, July, August. And then it went down, but now we are seeing a few spikes coming up again in, in some countries and in others, it continues to decline. So based on the regions, the highest impact based on the number of cases reported has been in the southern region and with South Africa actually being the highest in this region.

We need to bear in mind that reported case cases actually depend on the number of tests that have been carried out, in, in a particular country and also the level of reporting. So South Africa has been very good with the level of reporting. I think all countries have somehow been affected with some shortages, probably in testing, testing materials and so forth somewhere along the way.

So, those are things that we need to bear in mind as I, as I talk about these, these variations. And then after the southern region, the northern region was the 2nd highest with the highest numbers being reported from Morocco and Egypt. Then followed by the eastern region with the highest numbers being reported from Ethiopia and Kenya.

The western region was the 4th, and then central region had the least number of cases being reported. And then also I just need to make you aware that when we say number of cases reported, we're not taking into consideration the as in case per per number of people per per population. So in terms of per population, the, the highest number of cases per 100,000 people reported was in Libya, and then followed by Cabo Verde, and then Morocco, Tunisia, Botswana, South Africa, and then Namibia.

So, in terms of private practise, in countries like South Africa and Nigeria where there was complete lockdown for maybe several days or weeks, there was a very bad effect on private practise in that the turnover really dropped drastically up to probably a quarter of what it normally would be in, in some practises. And then also, a lot of private practises had to introduce team protocols as well as working on rotational basis, which reduced the staffing levels, making it even more difficult to actually work, because you'll find that sometimes staffing levels went down, but the number of clients did not actually drop. There are variations in that as well.

And then also, Inability or reduced access to patients through households or farm visits. This also affected revenue also affected the veterinary, the, the vets because if you can't see your, your, your, your patients as the vet, you generally tend to stress a little bit more because you're not very sure what is happening. And then also an increase in teleconsult consultation.

This is something that happened kind of inadvertently. It just, it just happened. Without any, policies or anything like that to guide it, it, it just happened because you couldn't get clients coming in in some cases.

And then increased cost of running the clinics also was noted because now everyone had to procure PPE as well as, other. Biosecurity materials. So that was an increased cost on, on, on clinics, and then reduced ability to procure some drugs, consumer goods and auxiliary services because of reduction in revenue, which put a strain on the finances of private practitioners.

In addition to that, that increased burden on colleagues, could be seen as salaries in some in some places were slashed. Some people had to be laid off and yeah, so basically that's increased financial burden also tend to deteriorate mental health basically in colleagues because of the social pressures associated with COVID. You had reduced income and then also just the fear of contracting the disease, either from clients and possibly from animals, but OK, not really from animals, but from clients, that was really quite a concern.

And then also some people just had to resign because the the stress was too much, they became depressed, and some jobs were actually terminated. So private practise was hit quite hard in in some in some places. Some clinics had to cut services to only provide first vaccinations for puppies and kittens, and no surgeries except emergencies, could be, could be carried out.

So this definitely had a big impact on revenue as well. And then restricted hours of operation. In some countries, government actually put a restriction on number of hours, put a restriction also on services that could be provided, which was a further loss of income for for practises.

In the public veterinary service provision, there was definitely a decline in, in general service provision, because of the safety measures that had to be put in. So therefore, vaccinations that would normally be carried out by the public, veterinary service, were not done or they were delayed. And then also things like campaigns for like spay campaigns and so forth, routine farmer engagement was not done.

And then because you could not go and meet clients physically, and some would not actually allow vets onto their farms, and they would not attend anything that requires people to come together even if social distancing was somewhat assured. . And then also, because state feds were mostly requested to stay home during the lockdown, they could not provide other services, even to, for instance, private practitioners, for instance, to foresee things like licencing and, and, and permits and so forth, it became a little bit difficult.

And then also internet connectivity was not always possible, so things like meetings, some of them could not happen. Virtual meetings, yes, were introduced, but it was not always possible for everyone who needed to be there to actually attend or attend the whole meeting because of connectivity issues. And then also the fact that officers were either completely sent home or working on rotational basis also meant that the services that you could get from the private sector were reduced and or were, were delayed in, in some way.

And then also, masks, hand washing, these things were introduced on entering offices. And I'll say that in, in countries like Zambia, you had to have a mask on, you had to wash your hands or have hand sanitizer when you entered government buildings, or any other officers for that matter. In the pharmaceutical industry, we noted that there was increased pressure on the industry, first of all, due to delay in supply of of pharmaceuticals and, and other commodities that they sell, and therefore, sometimes non-availability at the source, especially where things had to be imported into the country, .

And this definitely caused drug shortages and then in countries where there was a lockdown, some pharmaceuticals had to actually just shut down, and that resulted obviously loss of revenue. And then product representatives who normally would travel around to, to market their products and, you know, talk more about their products could not do that because of travel restrictions as well as face to face meetings not being allowed. So it was rather difficult for this aspect of the industry to, to function.

Yes, virtual meetings were introduced here and there, but it's just not the same as actually having face to face meetings. You don't get that, the same impact. And then in some cases, and I think Louis has already talked about these products that were that are common both to human and veterinary medicine, were harder to source for the veterinary industry because they were prioritised for human consumption.

So we saw this happening to some degree. And then Scaling down of farming operations resulted in less movement of agri veterinary stock. So that was another impact on the pharmaceutical industry.

And some of them ended up with expired products because Of this. We also noted that there was an increase also in the cost of pharmaceutical products during this time, and it has continued. And then also the increased cost due to due to having to scale up on biosecurity measures in all operations, generally.

So, in terms of veterinary professional bodies, physical meetings were cancelled or they were postponed, virtual meetings were introduced, and we had online broadcasts and campaigns being introduced, virtually or utilising. social media to get messages across, this happened more and more, than it ever did before. One positive thing though was that CPD's or CE became completely virtual.

Meaning that, there was a, less of a cost on hosting, CE, and there was a lot of free CE available around, even from within, within countries, not just internationally, but also it became cheaper to get international speakers to speak in, in, in conferences and, and other virtual meetings because you didn't have to fly them in. . However, internet connectivity also meant that some people just could not stay the length of the meeting or they just couldn't log in, which was a, a disadvantage.

And then, with the vaccine with the veterinian associations, things like vaccination campaigns could not be held for some time, especially where there was lockdown. In some countries, the lockdown actually happened like it would happen suddenly, maybe for 34 days, go off again, and then come on again suddenly. So it was also very difficult to plan things and to plan activities because you didn't know when the lockdown would happen.

Just a bit on the, maybe a bit on a tangent, there's one country that reported they, they were importing day old chicks. They arrived at the border on the other side, and then their country suddenly went into lockdown, and then they couldn't bring the day old chicks in, which was rather disastrous. So.

Those are impacts of, of these sudden lockdowns that would happen. And then also schools closed, which made it impossible for vets to go into schools to carry out the usual awareness programmes on animal welfare or even on on animal diseases, especially around World rabies Day, this was practically impossible. With veterinary laboratory services, we noted that there were delays in the processing of tests and results.

And also the fact that staff were mostly on either rotational basis or some laboratories closed, it became a bit difficult to get your, your results unless you had an in-house laboratory. On veterinary education, this has been greatly impacted, I think, across the world, basically, . Some veterinary schools have had to close for months.

Others are doing online teaching, which is also difficult with internet connectivity. Practical skills and experience have been, were virtually impossible to, to do while lockdowns are on or while schools were closed, and then this obviously would result in delays in graduation. Just last minute and Toby.

Thank you. And then with animal welfare, movement restrictions basically prevented people who are monitoring and enforcing animal welfare laws from actually getting into places to see what is happening and to, to make sure that animals are being kept well. In places where Vets could not conducts spaces and and castrations means that we are going to have a problem because there'll be a bigger burden on animal welfare societies with unwanted pets and and so forth.

And then obviously the decline in financial support from the supporting agencies to animal welfare has had an impact on the the ability for these societies to actually function and, and take care of of animals. And this also has had an impact on the welfare of wildlife, especially those that are being taken care of in sanctuaries and animal orphanages. Obviously the the loss of income or the loss of revenue on these organisations and agencies has had an impact on how these animals will fare.

Basically, I'll just say that the impact on animal owners has been a financial one because they have not been able to get the resources that they need to be able to now take animals to the clinic, but in some ways also. Them being at home most of the time has made them more aware of problems with their animals and in some cases, we've seen clinics that have actually had a higher number of, of, of clients coming in during this time. Research impacted because universities closed and also movement restrictions, meaning they could not go and collect samples and so forth, and also veterinary accreditation, basically because of movement restrictions and not being able to have face to face meetings, inspections for accreditation were cancelled or postponed.

So thank you very much for listening. Thank you so much, and Tomy that was really, really interesting and it's it shows really that there is the same stories, you know, I could have been listening to somebody at the BVA giving that talk as well there's there's so many similarities, so thank you so much for for that presentation. We're now going to move on to Doctor Matthew Stone, who is going to talk about the impact of COVID-19 on vet services around the world.

And how the World organisation for Animal Health, or the OIE has managed to support members. Matthew is the Deputy Director General of the the World organisation for Animal Health, and he has spent most of his career in New Zealand, working for the government veterinary services. Obviously he's also a veterinary surgeon, a veterinary epidemiologist, and at the moment at the OIE he oversees global strategies for, Many of the zoonotic diseases, many of the diseases also that spread through through animals, such as foot and mouth disease, rabies, and is also looking after antimicrobial resistance as well.

So huge problems. Another one has been added with COVID-19, and Matthew, I'm really looking forward to how the OIE has been able to help during this very difficult and turbulent time. Over to you, Matthew.

Thank you, Anthony, and thank you to WBA for the opportunity. To participate in the seminar. My talk is going to be in 4 parts.

I'll just quickly start by looking at the factors that are driving disease emergence and the vulnerabilities, and the new focus for veterinary services worldwide and certainly the World organisation for Animal Health's members, which are the government veterinary authorities, the new focus on preparedness. We'll look at veterinary services participation in the COVID-19 responses and Also the issue of Maintaining business continuity for veterinary services, and this has been well covered by the previous two speakers, so my talk will focus a little bit more anecdotally on some of the stories that we're hearing. And then we'll look at how we, the OAE is thinking about supporting resilience in our veterinary services.

Starting with disease emergence and vulnerabilities. Well, I think we all can recognise that over the last few decades, the emergence of disease at the One Health interface, as we say, zoonotic disease transferred from animal reservoir hosts into humans, has, has grown and become a major problem. With the increased opportunity for global spread and distribution as a result of long supply chains, increasing trade and travel.

And those vulnerability factors were very nicely summarised by Dr. Cameron Khan from Blue Dot during the OIE's. One health and big data conference that we held in Sardinia last year, you'll see all the sorts of factors that are essentially driving this increased vulnerability, the increased emergence of zoonotic disease, and then the impact that they're having worldwide.

Of course, the hypothesised sources of COVID-19 and wildlife create a large focus on the wildlife trade as well. And these are often They are often trade channels that operate rather informally, and without a great deal of oversight of veterinary services. And that's something that I think is very important now to close up.

We need to see a stronger relationship between veterinary services and wildlife services internationally. So that's going to be a new focus. For the OE, where, we work very closely with our expert group, the Wildlife Working Group, and early on the response, the Wildlife Working Group released its statement on the importance of wildlife trade in emerging zoonotic diseases, and the OE is building on Now and looking to develop a new programme of activity on wildlife health risk management, working with our partners in that, including the collaborative partnership on sustainable wildlife Management, a collection of international organisations.

Now, also the focus on emergency preparedness and the resilience of veterinary services, their ability to respond to animal health emergencies. On the left of the screen, you'll see an infographic from a current project between OAE, FAO, and Interpol, looking to build. Those relationships between security services and veterinary services, ensure that veterinary services are linked up with whole of government emergency management capability.

And it's giving us the opportunity to to update some of the tools, such as the FAO manual on good emergency management practise, create New tools, such as the guidelines for stimulation exercises that the OEE has just released, and of course, publish scientific information and review articles such as, you'll see up in the top right, the issue of the OE scientific technical review that we've just released on disaster prevention and preparedness. OK, let's look very quickly at the veterinary services participation in COVID-19 responses. And the framework that I've created here looks at five key areas, emergency operations centre staffing, diagnostic laboratory surge capacity, water services coordination.

Local outbreak support, and let's recognise the important aspect of the meat processing facilities and the human outbreaks that we've seen associated with meat processing worldwide. And then, of course, One Health R&D. Now, I'm not going to cover off all of these.

In fact, I've just really selected some anecdotal stories. All of these are available on the OE website, and they're national stories that our countries have provided to us. So the Bhutan Veterinary Services are linking up in a one health perspective with their government counterparts to support the border services, and bring their expertise in contact tracing and quarantine, to play in their country.

R&D has already been mentioned. A great story here from the, the Friedrich Loeffler Institute FLI in Germany, which is an OE collaborating centre for zoonoses in Europe. They've been undertaking right from the outset, a number of very important animal challenge studies that determine, animal susceptibility.

The story is also available on our website. Just on the right hand. Side of the page there.

I'll just highlight the OE technical fact sheet on SARS-COV-2 in animals, where all the information that's coming through from immediate notifications to the OE through our World Animal Health Information System, or more research and development-based findings, in the scientific literature are being collated to provide a comprehensive picture of SARS-COVD-2 in animals. Now, testing of, support for the public health diagnostic surge capacity has been very important as well. And early on, the OE brought a team of experts together under our Biological Standards Commission oversight to create a guideline on the considerations for veterinary laboratories and becoming engaged in this sort of response.

And some great stories emerging. This one highlighted through the photos in Ghana of the veterinary laboratories, and their active support for testing of human samples, but a number of other stories as well, you've seen links down the. Bottom in terms of activity in Indonesia, Italy and Spain, and as the previous speakers have mentioned, this is occurring in many countries, and it's really great to see the advanced technical capability of veterinary laboratories being recognised.

OK, so on to maintaining business continuity and in fact, the previous speaker has covered this very well in terms of the issues associated with Africa. The, the issues here, of course, maintaining clinical services to livestock, companion animals. The impact on, let's call it the non-target impact on disease control and eradication programmes, which is a great concern for the OAE.

Impact on early warning surveillance systems, and then, of course, workplace safety. So again, I'm not going to go through all of these, but I just would like to really thank the World Veterinary Association for our partnership that resulted in this statement on veterinary. Activities is essential very early on in the response, which was then tweeted and publicised through social media, and we hope was helpful at a national level to ensure that veterinary services were able to maintain business continuity during lockdowns.

Across the disease control strategies, you'll see the ones that the OEE is engaged in in partnerships with others, illustrated around the outside, from African swine fever, to foot and mouth disease, zoonotic influenza, hepatic ruinna, a biological threat reduction strategy, the zoonotic TB roadmap, And antimicrobial resistance and rabies. Now, a lot of these, of course, rely on mass campaigns such as mass surveillance operations or mass vaccination, and we know that that has been impacted, but I'm very pleased to hear that or see in fact that the reports that we're receiving that indicates. Surveillance activity from veterinary services returning.

Our reports through the World Animal Health Information System over the last few weeks have been as strong as ever, even before the pandemic. So we're pleased to see that it looks as if veterinary services are learning to to work within the restrictions of the pandemic. Now, I also know and I keep tabs on my home country, New Zealand, that that veterinary statutory bodies and veterinary associations have been doing a great job of interpreting national government guidelines as they apply to veterinary practise.

You'll see on the right hand side of this screenshot from the Veterinary Council of New Zealand's website, the sorts of specific standards and guidance that has been provided to veterinarians in New Zealand. I'm sure this activity is going on in many countries as well. Finally, I was really taken by this graph from The Economist magazine just last week in terms of the impacts in broader society and the fact that government measures may not have been applied equally, or in fact, Freedoms have been removed, for people around the world, including democratic freedoms, elections deferred, all these sorts of things.

Obviously, veterinarians play a key role in civil society, and it's important to recognise that across the board, we know that, that people are suffering around the world for all sorts of reasons. Now, finally, just a couple of slides in terms of the OE's efforts to build resilience and veterinary services. We've been looking across our current service offering across the very many work programmes that we support government veterinary services across our 182 member countries.

And we're looking at this through the lens of our new strategic plan. And it's 5 strategic pillars that you can see on the right-hand side of the screen. And we're really undertaking a deep reflection of how we can improve our services to our members to build their capability, to build their capacity, and to build their resilience.

And of course, at the heart of this sits the investment case for animal health systems. The OE works with partners to ensure the contribution of veterinary services to the sustainable development goals is well understood. To ensure that investment and capacity building, for instance, through the OE's performance of veterinary services pathway is strengthened, and to ensure that the global public good that veterinary services are is understood and receives the investment that we know it should.

I'm going to finish there and again thank WVA for the opportunity to participate. Thank you so much, Matthew for that whistle stop tour. That was really excellent, just to see some of the great work that's being done across the world.

So thank you so much for that presentation. We're now going to move on to Merlens, who is the president of the International Veterinary Students Association, and he's also a 5th year student at the University of Khent. She's actually from Maastricht in Holland but is studying in Belgium.

And she's gonna be talking about the how how COVID-19 is affecting the student body, so over to you, Mara. Yeah, thank you so much for the introduction, Anthony. I'm very excited to be here and to be able to give all of you a student perspective on the future of veterinary education under a pandemic situation.

There's different ways of looking at this specific topic. So on the one hand, I'll be talking about what the, the new normal will be like in veterinary education, and in the end, I'll quickly touch base on my expectations in regards to education in the next pandemic. .

But first, it's really important to, you know, take a step back and evaluate what changes have been happening in these past few months cos only when we really look at the, the history, however recent it may be, will we be able to tell what the future of veterinary education holds. So how this pandemic was handled by educational institutions really differed per region, and therefore the future of veterinary education will also differ per region and even per country. One of the most important things to realise is that even though I'm here to give the the student's perspective, it's very hard for me to present all the students around the world, .

The future of veterinary education is not going to be the same in Belgium as in Colombia or in Nigeria. That's why I decided to use a regional approach for this topic as to not overgeneralize my European experiences. So I've reached out to my fellow IPSA members to get as many different views as possible.

And I use those as a basis for my presentation as well. So in general, Europe was very quick to provide sufficient online material and means of studying, so online education has been going pretty well. A lot of universities already had lower degrees of online teaching in place, and the main concern raised, raised by European students was missing out on practical courses as well as .

The effect of the pandemic on, on mental health. The latter was actually an issue that was raised by students from every single region. Many universities have also shown significant progress when you're comparing their spring semesters to the autumn semesters.

And for the Americas, in Latin America there also was a pretty big transition to online education. About 75% of universities actually managed to do this. However, given that the internet access in some parts was was less than sufficient, that posed quite some issues.

Even though a lot of universities realised that there would be students having difficulty accessing the online lectures, less than half of them actually took solid steps to tackle this problem. And then North America was technologically seen better equipped and can therefore be compared to the situation in Europe, as well as the Pacific. So in Asia, many regions and countries such as Nepal only have 2G internet or sometimes even no internet access at all.

This made it almost impossible to continue education and therefore, some universities even closed down for a total of up to 5 months. Online courses were therefore very difficult to access and exams were postponed for quite some time. Some countries experienced less issues such as Malaysia and Singapore, which have a better internet distribution.

In Africa, as this, graph also shows, a lot of students encountered call interruptions and only about 39% of the institutions were able to provide e-learning. This graph, originates from the survey that had over 500 participants, and most of them came from Eastern Africa. So like Asia, there are some countries that managed to transition into online education a lot better, such as South Africa, for example, which managed to offer adequate online courses and also installed proper safety precautions for practical courses.

So the regional differences here are characterised by something called the digital divide, which is the gap in access to and use of technology and the internet. So you've got the digital digitally developed regions in comparison to technologically less advanced regions. Of course, there are some country-based exceptions, as I mentioned previously, and this digital divide can actually also be used on a local level.

So when, for example, you're looking at comparing low income households versus high income households from the same country or even from the same city. So what is gonna happen to veterinary education now? There's 5 different things I'm expecting to happen, but not all of them are actually going to take place on a university level.

Please note that I in no way offer any certainty that any of this will actually happen. I've based these predictions on answers given by my IBSA members and just reading up on some articles. So the first thing is I'm gonna expect there'll be an increase in hybrid learning.

I'm also gonna expect that everyone will realise by now that the internet has become an a necessity and really isn't a luxury anymore. Furthermore, this pandemic has brought to light the new role of veterinarians when it comes to these pandemics. And one of the main consequences of moving things online was that the inequality was highlighted and defined by whether or not someone had internet access, that inequality will need to be set straight.

And last but not least, the need for increased mental health support has been highlighted during this pandemic. For hybrid education, this pandemic has started the largest and fastest remote learning experiment in human history. It has pushed students and teachers into a digital era.

This transformation, which was already in place in many different regions, has definitely been accelerated by this pandemic. A lot of institutions were already experimenting with varying degrees of digital teaching and learning before the pandemic. But this has taught them that the digital tools can be highly complementary to face to face learning.

This hybrid model of in-person lessons and distance learning, also known as blended learning, will likely become one of the key models for post-pandemic education. It offers some really great advantages, such as increased flexibility as well as communication, but on the other hand, there'll need to be some adjustments too. After the pandemic, courses will likely be redesigned and even remediated to better suit digital learning.

Furthermore, there are two other complementary approaches to online teaching and learning. One is to build relevant platforms and technologies, and the other is to invest in faculty development. One of the greatest challenges in this abrupt transition to fully remote learning during the pandemic was the lack of fluency in the tools of teaching online.

Investing in technology in and of itself is never enough. It has to accomplish certain educational objectives and for this, professors will need access to continuous professional development opportunities. So when we transition to hybrid learning.

Institutions will also need to invest in teacher training. Seeing that veterinary medicine is also a very practical study and not purely theoretical, we need to be wary of leaning too much into the online side of education and forgetting to focus on the importance of practical and communicational skills that are definitely better thought in person. As to ensure our next generation of vets will remain as competent as they are now.

Moving towards this form of hybrid education. Is a very likely scenario in regions with good internet. Access, but in other regions, they'll most likely first have to be some improvements in internet accessibility before blended learning.

Can be used successfully, and that brings me to internet as a necessity. So I'm looking at this from a very student-centric point of view, where universities, industries and governments kind of exist to just suit our needs. So the main factor here is that by now, every single person has realised how important wide internet access is and how big of an impact internet accessibility can have on the different methods of education.

So I expect that after this pandemic, governments will increase their funding for improvements in internet accessibility. Universities will train their staff, redesign courses, and invest in online platforms and learning tools. And then there's the tech industry that has now become aware of the high demand for educational technology.

So you will likely see a huge boost in new developments in this field after the pandemic as well. During this pandemic, as quite some of my previous speakers also mentioned, veterinarians have definitely shown that commitment to support the work of human health authorities. So laboratories have used their experience and expertise in their high testing capacities.

Veterinary clinics have been donating essential material. Such as ventilators and protective materials, and then there's veterinary professionals that have been volunteering in laboratories, as well as in hospitals, and in some countries, veterinary epidemiologists have also been active in the public health response to track the disease and to support the development of the effective public health interventions. It's completely undeniable that veterinarians have had a very, a very important role in this pandemic, and that is not something that all vet students are taught currently.

It is therefore also to be expected that the role of vets in pandemics such as this is something future vets might encounter in their own curriculum sooner rather than later. The variety of ways in which vets can contribute to tackling pandemics and being part of this one health response in situations like this is something we're teaching our students a bit more. As I mentioned before, when I spoke about the digital divide on a local level, the income of the household was all of a sudden influencing the accessibility to online educational material.

Therefore, learning losses have definitely become bigger in low income households. As you can see, this graph shows that low income households in the US will be a lot less likely to own technological devices or simply have home broadband. This socioeconomic gap can be used to explain the difference in access to distance learning and therefore also for time spent studying while the schools were closed.

To solve the inequality that was worsened by this pandemic, there's 3 things I suggest and really hope to to see once this pandemic is over. So for one, the learning loss in students needs to be reversed by engaging our students in accelerated learning interventions. Secondly, teachers will need to be trained to coach students through the catching up process, and thirdly, there needs to be an increased funding for remote learning opportunities as well as internet access to improve future outcomes.

In the meantime, we should be very cautious because investments in educational technology products are very likely to increase inequalities and further disadvantage the poorest countries and households. Access to these technologies will grow, but it's gonna be very slowly. So therefore, in the short term, educational technology is not going to be able to replace the traditional modes of learning, especially in regions that will first need to further develop wider internet access.

That may contradict some of my previous statements on expecting to see a very quick rise in hybrid learning, but the main point I really want to make here is not that we shouldn't move into this new form of blended learning, but simply that we need to be wary of excluding students by moving too fast in our strive towards digitalized education. Another result of this pandemic is that mental health issues and students have increased drastically, less social contact, less exercise, more screen time, a higher work pressure, in combination with just a a general sense of chaos and lack of routine has made it very difficult for students to take time for themselves and pay attention to any mental issues that they may have, such as fear of failure, anxiety, or even depression. Even though every single IPSA member that responded to my questions indicated that this pandemic highlighted the need for mental health support, only very few actually had a university that took steps to address this issue during the pandemic.

So universities will not only need to invest more in mental health support, but they also need to address the underlying cause of the increase in mental health. This isn't something new that just happened because of this COVID-19 pandemic. It is an already existing issue that just became even more pressing now.

Curricula should be redesigned, deadlines should be better adjusted to each other, and the overall work pressure in students should be lowered. Universities can invest in things like free psychological care as well as a support network for students to rely on when looking for advice on planning and studying and taking exams. So about 4 years ago, IDSA developed the Standing Committee on Wellness, which has dedicated all of these years of existence to helping students better cope with the daily stress that they face during their studies.

So during this pandemic, our Standing Committee on Wellness actually started some specific projects to help our students through quarantine and lockdowns. Such as movie marathons and study together sessions, and they developed some fact sheets on tips and tricks in regards to online learning. These are some really great initiatives that can also be done at a university level.

Then, at last, what is gonna happen in the next pandemic? This is it, this is something that's very hard for me to predict actually, since it will completely depend on the virus. Not every pandemic is the same, one might not affect younger people at all, or another might only affect younger people.

One is gonna have a very high mortality rate, and another is not. However, anything that will be fairly similar to COVID-19 will most likely be handled with a lot more efficiency than now. Which also makes sense because standard protocols for lockdown will already be in place.

There's gonna be online platforms in use, and students and teachers will already know how to, how to deal with them because they'll already have this experience from this pandemic and they'll be able to take that in with them to the next lockdown, . That's gonna make the transition to online learning so much easier and definitely so much quicker. And that was all for me and I look forward to hearing some of your questions during this panel discussion.

Thank you so much, Meryl. That was absolutely fantastic, a really interesting perspective from you there. People have been asking questions, how many people we've got on.

We've got close to 200 on at the moment. This obviously will be available on the site, so do tell friends and colleagues about it. It would be fascinating.

To know where you're listening from as well. So if you want to pop where you're listening from, that would be great, and we are keeping an eye on the questions. We're now going to move on to the next stage, which is, the, the actual award ceremony.

So this is to mark the 2020 World Veterinary Association's global welfare Awards, and these have been kindly supported by CIA Animal Health. This was due to take place at the WVA conference in New Zealand in the springtime, but obviously, that event, was, was cancelled in a physical sense, but obviously we helped to take it online. So this, virtual celebration has been put together, in place of that.

We thought it would be great to let you all take part in the celebrations to recognise veterinarians, veterinary technicians, nurses, and students, and schools and colleges who have gone above and beyond in the field of animal welfare over the last 12 months. We are going to play you the video now. If there is an issue with watching it live and online, we're also going to put in.

The YouTube link, so you'll be able to listen on your own, on your own computer on on YouTube, but hopefully technology will allow us to show it. So over now to our host for the awards, television and radio journalist, Nick Wood. Thank you.

Hello there. I'm in the historic heart of Brussels, close to the headquarters of the World Veterinary Association. Now the WVA's Global Welfare Awards, supported by SEA celebrate the very best of veterinarians, vet technicians and nurses, vet students, and for the first time this year, vet colleges and schools for going above and beyond in the field of animal welfare.

Over the last 12 months. In the coming weeks, you're going to be able to see a series of video reports highlighting the stories of those medal winners. But first of all, stick with us for just a few minutes as we stage our own virtual ceremony to celebrate those successes.

Increasingly vets are being encouraged and they're expected to be advocates for animal welfare. Paul goes above and beyond every day in terms of his commitment to trying to improve the lives of animals. I'm Professor of animal behaviour and animal welfare Science at the University of Sydney's School of Veterinary Science.

I'm based in Sydney, but I live and work chiefly in the Hunter Valley, 2 hours north of Sydney, where I'm surrounded by the animals I study. I'm absolutely passionate about horses, we owe them so much. What I'm particularly focused on at the moment is the use of equipment, chiefly the whip.

And the whip in racing. He's done so much to change the way we think about animals, particularly horses and dogs, but to just bring animal welfare into people's living rooms, because he's such a fantastic communicator about the issues that that he's been working on and and clearly feels really passionate about. I think it's a very special conference.

It's an event that helps veterinary students actually understand the meaning of what it is to be a vet and what it is to be an advocate for animals. I think the standard approach in this case should be understanding that animal welfare is important. If we preach that, we also have to understand that that also means that we care about their welfare, not only about their health.

It is a topic that not just vet students focus a lot about but IDSA as well. Our standing Committee on Animal welfare is our oldest committee that exists and that just really shows how important it is for all of us. The optimum animal welfare delivery is not about disease management, it's about disease prevention.

The first thing is to make sure that these animals are handled properly. And that's my own campaign too. Once you fail in animal welfare delivery, you are putting the environment into threat, you are putting the consumers into threat, you are threatening the economy.

In every other aspect, even in the veterinary clinic, when it comes to animal welfare, it's one of the outstanding technologies that we have here on campus. So I think in winning the award is going to give him further boosts and encouragement in pursuing welfarism in animals. Animal welfare is an integral and growing part of any form of animal ownership.

And production. My main contributions have been, first of all, with the veterinary students. To instil in them the idea that they are absolutely vital to the promotion of animal welfare.

For the last 10 years, I've been chairman of the livestock welfare coordinating Committee, which is unique in that it's the only organisation that is entirely funded by the livestock industry. The Animal welfare has become more and more important lately, and I think the plight of veterinarians and the role that veterinarians can play in animal welfare is becoming more and more important, and we should realise our role within animal welfare. I noticed that she was an outstanding student.

I see the potential of improving science through addressing welfare of animals that you use in research. I'm trained as a veterinarian and then I specialised in human nutrition and biochemistry, and because of my veterinary background, I was invited to join the animal ethics Review Committee at the Faculty of Medicine and then to look after the animal facility in the faculty and also to join the Sri Lanka Association of Laboratory Animal Sciences. So that was an opportunity for me.

To get back into the veterinary field to use what I have learned. She has a passion for the wellbeing of the animals through the Sri Lankan Veterinary Association. We are planning to have an animal ethics forum.anga will definitely take the leadership, and we are trying to push the politicians to pass the animal welfare bill.

On behalf of the World Veterinary Association and Seva Animal Health, I had the pleasure in presenting this animal welfare award to Doctor Kaanga. Animal welfare is absolutely fundamental to everything we do as a veterinary community. We're delighted to win the award.

It helps acknowledge that hard work. A really important part of what the the Animal Welfare centre does here is outreach, particularly to Asia, but sometimes to other countries, and that is really supporting other vet schools, other vet programmes to improve their animal welfare teaching. Obviously, we teach our own students here about animal welfare.

We have quite a big research programme in animal welfare, so that's gathering the evidence base. One of the reasons for setting up the Jean Marcy International centre for Animal. For education here at the vet school.

One of the drivers for that was a concern that vets should be the voices for animal welfare. They should be advocating for animal welfare in policy, and in other areas, and perhaps those voices weren't strong enough. And so part of our thinking and our teaching is to help support our students to have the skills to engage in those sorts of things.

What I think we have in particular done is embedded animal welfare throughout the curriculum right from the start through to when they graduate and I would like to think that our graduates from this school actually take away animal welfare as a lifelong learning opportunity. So congratulations to the winners of the 2020 WVA Welfare Award supported by SIA. You will be able to see the films highlighting their individual successes through the WVA's and also Siva's websites, but also a whole series of social media outlets, and we hope you will help us to share their successes wherever you are in the world.

It's a really prestigious award, and you get the global recognition and it will definitely facilitate the work that I'm conducting in promoting animal welfare, especially in research animals. It's wonderful to receive this award because it recognises that. There is now an expectation that vets should be advocates for animals and their welfare.

My great hope for the future is that more and more people are accepting that we all have a duty to look after animals as well as we can. It helps raise awareness of animal welfare, both in the student body, but more globally. It helps us with our outreach and getting this award is sort of recognition of the hard work of that team.

I really couldn't believe this happened. Because it's just such a huge honour and such a huge privilege, and yes, I'm just over the moon. Me to represent Nigeria as ambassador of Africa in welfare delivery for 2020.

Initially I thought I was in the dreamland, and I don't feel like waking up from the dream. Thank you so much. That was just so inspirational and fabulous to see all those award winners.

We're gonna now move on to our round table discussion, so please do bring your videos on, please, everybody who's on the . On, on the . The committee on this round table, just really inspirational, all of those, all of those presentations, the great work that's going on.

So thank you so much, everyone, for, for the fabulous work that everybody's doing. I'm just trying to find my PowerPoint presentation, so give me a second to. Dial that up, but, perhaps while we're just waiting to do that, I would like to also introduce our speakers again, Doctor Luis Pedro Carmo, who as you know, works at the Veterinary Public Health Institute in the University of Bern, Doctor Ntombi Menda, who's the president of the Zambian Veterinary Association, Doctor Matthew Stone, who's the Deputy Director General of the World organisation for Animal Health.

I'm Meryl Knobs, who is the president of the IVSA, and then we've got three other esteemed speakers who've come to join the round table, Doctor Scott Base, Doctor Nancy De Bruyner, and Doctor Doug Cratt, and I wonder, Doctor Scott, if you want to start up just by introducing yourself and then Nancy and then Doug. Yeah, thanks Anthony. I guess I'll be quick.

So I'm a veterinary internist to just focus on infectious diseases, with a big emphasis on emerging diseases, zoonotic diseases. Infection control and I've been fairly immersed in COVID actually since January we're paying attention to it and trying to figure out the animal aspects, so we've been working on surveillance, but a large part, how do we function in veterinary practises in the COVID era with the restrictions we need to do to balance safety and effective patient care. So we've done a lot of work on guidelines and trying, trying to figure out how we can effectively manage animals while protecting ourselves.

That's great, and now on to Nancy. Good morning, everybody. Good afternoon.

Good evening wherever you are. It's very great to be here. So my name is Nancy de Briena, and I'm, I work for the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe.

We are the umbrella organisation for all the European. A national veterinary associations and so from March on immediately we started to, to work really hard on, on supporting our members for in COVID and, and we're very grateful to be here today. Thank you.

That's fantastic. And then, Doug if you want to say a few words as well. Sure, thank you, as I'm very honoured to be gathering with all of you today in this virtual setting.

That seems to be the new way for many of us, although after hearing some of the presentations today also understanding that it is somewhat of a privilege in certain parts of the country to have the technology to be able to do this, to have us gather, you know, we've seen veterinary medicine, I think evolve in very meaningful ways in the United States and the world within a very short period of time and that it does affect us all personally and professionally. As these cases continue to rise, I think using these technologies to be able to connect is still very important and, and glad that people can stay safe and, and, healthy, and keeping our team safe and healthy, but also drawing back on the mental health aspect that I think is one of the unintended consequences of this. So, I appreciate being able to participate in this round table today, so thank you.

Thank you so much, Doug. I think it's really interesting from Merrill's presentation as well. The digital transformation that's gone on over the last 6 months has been immense, and, and in some ways we're perhaps at ground zero at the beginning of this digital decade, it's going to be a really fascinating journey over the next, over the next decade to see where we end up at the end of, 2029.

Anyway, the first question is, how were veterinary services affected during the pandemic and, and were they all declared essential in your different areas of the world, so perhaps if we start with Scott first. Well, I think essential is a bit of a, a loaded term, so there, there's essential services as as the overall veterinary, field. But there are some things within that that were considered appropriate or inappropriate.

So we were considered an essential service, but within that, there was an attempt to try to say certain components that are essential and certain components aren't. So veterinary medicine is important. We need to maintain that, but we don't need to do everything that we were doing or we can't do everything we were doing because we need to restrict contacts, we need to restrict movement.

So that was the way it was at the start that. There was an attempt to maintain veterinary care but limit some of the things that were more elective that could be postponed for a few weeks that didn't have a big impact on animal health or welfare, human health or welfare production. So it was, and that was a very somewhat controversial, a fine line between what can we delay without having significant impacts.

So the short answer is yes, it was essential, but some components of that were considered elective and tried to be deferred. Thanks, Scott. What was the situation in Europe, Nancy, did did most countries suggest that the veterinary services were essential?

Yes, indeed, in Europe, in most countries, the veterinary profession was seen as essential. We very hard worked on that in the beginning of the outbreak and especially for for livestock production because the policymakers very quickly understood their importance in ensuring that the food supply chain. We saw that in the first lockdown, some veterinary practises, companion animal practises had to go to emergency care only in some countries, but in other countries, they almost managed to keep the, the practises going, taking, of course, extra safety measures.

And so on. And as a, as a fee, we very much promoted veterinarians to keep on working as much as they can. Of course, as long as they can do it safely for their self, their staff, and, and their clients.

So yeah, overall, it went pretty good. And Louis, obviously public health service is so important, obviously that really hasn't been affected and in some ways probably been augmented during this pandemic as well. Yes, absolutely, and we as I said, we were also recruited to work directly with the, with the Federal Office of, of Public Health.

So we did have lots of, pardon me, we did have lots of veterinarians working directly to, to the Federal Office of Public Health or even Cantonal offices. Yeah. It was interesting, I think Matthew was talking about it, within that public health situation.

Meat processing facilities seem to be, you know, hotbeds of COVID-19 in, in certain areas. Matthew, has, has anybody got any ideas why that maybe happened? Yeah, there's actually been a lot of work going into that.

a collection of factors that relate to how the workplaces are, are, are set up. The, the, the, the cool and humid, environment, which, helps propagate, or, or maintain virus survival. And, and.

It's often conditions outside the workplace as well. A lot of these workers, in many countries, not all countries, but many of them, are migrant workers living in very close proximity. And so there's been some very good studies going into that.

And there's also been some very good responsive work from the processing industry. To adapt workplaces, to reduce the risk of transmission and exposure in the workplace and restart processing under safe conditions. And there's been a variety of guidance produced by various bodies to help direct that activity as well.

That's really fascinating. I, I think it's been great to see the, the great work that OIE, the World Veterinary Association have done in lobbying governments to make sure that they really understood how important the veterinary services were during the pandemic. But Tobi, tell me a little bit about how that's worked in, in Zambia and obviously, you know, in the wider continent as well.

You're just muted at the moment and Tommy just on mute. Sorry about that. Yes, so in terms of being declared as essential, services, this did not happen much.

In Zambia, they were not declared as essential services, but then there were a lot of facilities that remained open, even at the peak of the, of the pandemic here. So veterinary clinics were free to, to operate, but they had to just come up with their own protocols on, how many patients they'll see, how they'll see the patients and how they would handle clients and, and that sort of thing. So it really became something which each individual clinic had to find a way of doing and with some guidance from the, from the veinian Association.

I know that in South Africa, there were some, . Services that were declared essential and you had to have a permit to actually move around or go to your clinic or something like that, yes. So, let me just say it came down to how organised the government was in terms of declaring what services were essential and were not.

And I think it's, it's really interesting, you know, as vets, we are experts in infectious diseases, obviously. I know Matthew, you know, you're dealing with, with rabies, foot and mouth disease and so on. I think it gives us a real advantage within that field, perhaps a lot of doctors, you know, don't deal with infectious diseases in the way they might have done.

50 or 100 years ago, so, do you think, and perhaps let Matthew start on this one, has this COVID-19 pandemic led to new national or regional opportunities for, for vets to become really a, you know, a much bigger part of this one health focus where sometimes it can feel that perhaps the service is being paid to vets, but we, we are such an important part of this one health focus, aren't we? For sure. And I think we all recognise that and we're proud of the fact that the One Health concept was something that veterinarians developed, and it's great to now see One Health entering the public discourse in the way it has as a result of this pandemic.

I think we've got a new frontier for us. The, the way that veterinarians and the medical profession are coming together around the one health concept around zoonotic disease is very important. But now, with all the challenges around emerging disease, biodiversity, the impacts on wildlife, climate change, we really now need To develop a very strong relationship with the environmental sector as well.

And that's something the third leg of the One Health Triad, let's say, that we're really focused on building now to develop our partnerships with wildlife Health Services in particular, because we can see that that's going to become important in the years ahead. And Merri if I could ask you the same question, how do you feel within a student setting, one, with regard to being lectured about this topic, you know, as part of your curriculum, but also, is there any collaboration between the International Veterinary Students Association and the International Medical Students Association? Yeah, so as I mentioned in my presentation as well as, I definitely think that there's gonna be a greater highlight of the importance that vets can play in this, in the whole one health concept, especially in pandemics, such as this.

I definitely do think that that is something that will be integrated more into our curriculums, and then in regards to our collaboration with the, the medical students, there's a student called IFMSA and they're one of our, Our biggest partners actually we collaborate on quite a high level with them. We always are invited to their events and they're invited to ours. We actually have Kind of like an umbrella organisation together with them as well as the pharmaceutical students and the dentistry students.

So that it's called the World Health Student Association, the WHSA, and that is an association that completely focuses on the principle of One Health because we as students also truly believe how important all of that is and how important it is to Educate our students on the concept as well. And I think it's so important that young members of the profession or soon to be members of the profession play such an important part in this. We've seen the, the, the role that young people like Greta Thunberg have played in the environmental role, which as, as Matthew said, is, is something that we need to now bring into the mix.

I, I suppose, Tom be asking you the same question, where wildlife is still so intertwined in your beautiful continent. With, with people and the animals in a way that it doesn't happen maybe as much in Europe or America. How do you feel, as a, as a Zambian veterinary surgeon, that the collaboration between the medical profession and the veterinary profession goes in, in Zambia and, you know, in, in, in Africa as a whole?

On this one health topic. Yeah, I think even before COVID came in, there was quite a bit of collaboration going on between the medical and the veterinary sectors, but COVID has actually made it even more important and, we, for instance, in the veterinary school, we're part of the team that . Had to join in with with the testing for human samples and so forth.

So that shows that there's some level of, shall I say, respect for the vet and, and their skills, yeah. Yes, and we were also called on to, you know, talk to people about possibility of transmission from their animals and how safe they were handing their animals and so forth. So, I think we, we were We had a bit of a spotlight as, as, as veterinarians, and I definitely think that the veterinary profession is more drawn into the one health concept now, more than ever.

Fantastic. I'm conscious that we've got to get through some, some more questions and, interested to see what people are thinking in the audience as well. I comment on that really quickly, Anthony?

Yes, be really quick, but I I think what we need to, we need to capture the time we've got now because I think the one health response has been abysmal. Like this is the one health example of our century. It's a wildlife associated disease.

It's a zoonotic disease, that brings in climate change, urban expansion, wildlife trade, zoonotic transmission, everything. But once it became a human disease, it was a human disease, and that was largely it. We talk about it, right?

But the greater interest in the population is really waned. And we need to figure out how to keep it on the radar and once this ends, we need to make sure that when this is reviewed, we figure out, OK, what are the one health approaches that would have prevented this or help mitigate it, because I, I fear that we've just, you know, it's become a human disease and we've ignored all the animal aspects and we're going to get back to where we are because memories are fairly short. So that's my pessimistic view, but it's more of an encouraging, you know, encouraging us to act you.

That's again to really lobby and to get that message out to governments that bets have a really important part to play in this, you know, in this pandemic, but in future pandemics as well, Scott. Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic.

Thank you, thank you so much for that. . How do you think the veterinary profession can help communities to sustain efforts in staying healthy and lowering the curve?

That's the, certainly the European and and American way of doing it for for the COVID-19 pandemic and maybe if I can bring in Louise for that in your public health capacity. Well, I, I, I believe that a lot of the activities that, that I presented today in which the vet sector was involved, Aim or or target the the lowering the curve and it can have a very positive impact in the communities, but I would like to, to highlight the the communication aspect that vets had during during the pandemic responses because they have such a close relationship with their clients and they're also sort of a voice of authority in terms of health. So people tend to respect their their advice and that to me seemed to be a a very a very important activity of of veterinarians.

And what about you, Doug? What, how do you think, that vets can, can help in that situation? We have, I think, a similar problem to you in, in the UK.

I walk around our supermarkets and some people want to wear masks, some don't. How, how does the veterinary profession help, to educate people and, and to keep people safe? Well, I think you hit it on the head right away, right?

We need to educate, so we're scientists, we're scientists, trained. We're also, in that, in the medical field, but we also have, I think, a much tighter, interface in the United States at least with our clients, being able to discuss the importance of, the proper hygiene and trying to keep our pets pets healthy and happy and safe as well as our livestock. But also the people that work with them and and trying to take a lot of the, the good hygiene practises along back and forth, but I think that we sense as veterinarians, we might have a little bit closer contact with the patient and the owner, so to speak, than maybe our human counterparts, yet we're still have that training with it and, you know, trying to talk to the importance of trying to maintain or limit the spread of any pathogens.

That's great, Doug. And what about you, Nancy, what are, what are your thoughts on how we can help in, in the community? I think as was highlighted by Louis's presentations, there's a lot of different things the veterinarian can offer to, to.

Lower the curve, but I think it also goes back to the previous question on on one health. It's a unique opportunity. One Health has never been so importantly on the table, but still we see that in many countries the veterinary profession offered help also, and the medical community didn't always know what to do with it.

And so we have to further To build on this collaboration and in the future, for example, just to give a very practical example, in many countries, veterinary laboratories helped to process COVID tests for human COVID tests, but in other countries and some very large ones, veterinary laboratories were refused to help with that. That's great. So we have to further work on that, on this collaboration, on, on this momentum we have now, also what Mel says to bring it back to the education, even on the education level to, to build it up together so that for the future, we have really it institutionalised on how veterinarians can help and can their help can be used.

Thank you, Nancy, that's really interesting. And I think that answers the next question, really, lessons learned, I think we had the same problem where trying to get, our government to use veterinary labs, and a lot of them were actually, they, they took the machines away to build super labs in places like Milton Keynes, and of course, the machines took some time to recalibrate, so time was lost, and of course testing couldn't be done. So I think that's certainly, one lesson.

I mean, Scott, obviously there are a lot of lessons that I, I must admit, you know, as a kind of normal GP but obviously with an interest in microbiology, I have been incredibly frustrated by, I remember in, in our COVID symposium in, in May, 15, we had one of the top doctors from New Zealand talking about the need to wear masks. At that time, and yet it was 2 months later before we actually saw that happening in the UK, so, maybe a couple of other lessons that we can learn and and perhaps move more quickly on. Over costs.

I, I think maybe my answer actually is more of an answer for the last question, but ties into this, and I think you've hit on some of the technology and testing and medical aspects. But I think looking back, one of the big things we could do as veterinarians is try to maintain as much normalcy as we can for people. People crave normalcy.

And they're under a lot of stress and the more we add on extra layers of stress, the harder it is. When we think about how restrictive we were, we with the animal contact at the start, we did it for a reason because we didn't know, but the spinoff effect was a lot of stress for clients for animal care. So I, I think we need to figure out and I think again that's probably the last question, but what we could do most.

Support people and looking forward to how we do it again is making sure that our profession is very reactive to maximise the control tools we can do to maximise the care that we can do. So it doesn't mean we just say we're we're practising like normal because we're essential. It means we need to rapidly shift to a safer model of practise and alternative modes of practise like telemedicine, so that there's a very small gap between the care that we.

We can provide whether it's on a farm or a pet so that we don't have to say we're not seeing patients for the next 2 or 3 months. We're saying, OK, we're gonna see you differently or we're doing it tomorrow or in 2 days we remove that stress or we maintain care, we maintain the profession. So I think looking ahead, it's how do we, how do we react and how do we maintain our, our, our core goals while trying to be responsible.

Just a very quick comment from all of you perhaps about telemedicine and how you feel that has helped with the veterinary response. I'm conscious, you know, time is moving on, so perhaps if we start with Louise. Well, I, I agree with what, with what Scott said, and I think we need to think, about, preventing rather than cure.

So we know that we might face other epidemics in the future and we better be prepared and have, our lessons learned. It's, talent medicine is really not my, my field, but I know that they, here in Switzerland, they've tried to adopt it as much as possible, especially during the partial lockdown periods. It's not something that is, extremely well accepted, but I think we need to, we need to start working on it so that, it becomes more of a normal thing.

Yeah, make it slicker. Yeah, what, what about, you, Nancy, obviously speaking, you know, with your FVE hat on, how, how do you feel it's, it's uptake has been, you know, across Europe. Well, it's been a very much debated issue, and, and overall our view is that telemedicine is a tool that can support veterinarians and it can complement other methods to make the consultation or make a diagnosis, but it's not meant to replace veterinarians.

We saw that, that some countries indeed made some temporary provisions to allow telemedicines and then I'm mostly talking about prescribing via telemedicine because using it for triage, of course. Is already long used and consultation also a little bit partly and and this came this opening up of of the of the possibility to use telemedicine for consultation and prescribing came with mixed views from the profession. As FE next week we will have a position paper for vote at our General Assembly.

It will probably be the most controversial item of our agenda, but the main position on the lines that veterinarians are always and remain. Always personally and fully responsible for the services they provide, and it calls also on to statutory bodies to define regulations on how telemedicines can be used and but doing it safely and having ensuring that the quality of services remains. So we will see how it goes next week.

Let us know, let us know, Nancy. I know it is a very contentious area. What what about you and Tomby?

How, how? Was that used in, in your own country, but perhaps more continent wide as well during the pandemic? Just on mute Toby.

Sorry. Yes, so, definitely we have a clientele that would be very happy with doing everything via telemedicine, but on the veterinary side of things, we are very cautious with it, because of the need to see the animal and so forth. So we do our best to try and Make sure that the animal is actually seen.

The challenge we have is that certain places are remote, and you may not find a veterinarian within even a 100 kilometre radius in some places. So in such situations, then you, you really just have to do what you can via teleconference or tele telemedicine and . But generally, if there is a capability of seeing the patient, then telemedicine is more or less frowned upon.

Just, you know, make sure what, what is happening. Is it an emergency or not? OK, now go see a vet, you know that, and, and it ends there.

Yeah. So. No, that's, that's fascinating.

It, it has its place, but, it, it can't replace. I, I, I'd love to hear what Mayor thinks of it as, you know, a young member of the profession, you know, you're gonna be around for the next 30, 40 years. How is that going to develop?

Over the next, you know, short term, over the next decade, this digital decade that we're just coming into. Yeah, I definitely think that the whole digital technologies and, you know, artificial intelligence as well they're gonna get a much larger, are gonna play a much larger larger role in in kind of like veterinary practises, . But, you know, as to like a a learning that student, one of the main things that I also think it's very important in the veterinary profession is communication, being there for your clients and, you know, talking to, to your patients and their owners and .

You know, how, how important the nonverbal side of communication is, and I think that's definitely something to be, to be wary about is to not move too much into the, the telemedicine side of the medicine. It sounds very complimentary, of course. I should.

It's, it's a big topic, and I, I'm sorry that we're sort of discussing it in 5 minutes, but I, I do want to finish. I'm going to let Doug finish with the, the last comment before I pass back to Patricia unless Matthew has something burning to say, but we'll let Doug finish with his thoughts on how telemedicine has been used in a pandemic in America. So it's, it's really, I would say it's, it's gaining a lot of traction in America in a very short period of time.

I wanna say that its use has probably tripled, but we hit, we've used telemedicine in different versions, right, throughout. All of my career, it's now we're talking about this video triaging, you know, we did telephone triage when they first came out, those aspects, I think that within the states, there's different regulations of how it can be used. Most of them we have already have to have a relationship with, the patient, the client that we're dealing.

With it, but I can also understand when Tomy talked about how the uses are in in Africa that could be completely different that it could be used in areas where care isn't there. We do use it I use it in private practise. I think that it, it is a tool that was a great phrase.

It's a tool, it's not meant to replace us. Even AI is going to be a tool that's gonna help us, . Offer better care, but it's not as meant as a replacement.

So we have to understand that is that is that we use it and implement it properly. I think it will be, it will be excellent and connected care, there's gonna be so much more to it than just this. There could be monitoring devices.

And all of that that could come back and give us more information. So I do expect it to be here. I think that this area, this digital area is going to explode and change our profession in very meaningful ways and allow us to offer better care, but it's a matter of making sure that we use it properly.

Maybe another WVA or FBE symposium is, is on the way there. So yeah, I would really look forward to that as well. Just to, to close off from, from myself, just would like to encourage you all to answer the survey that will pop up at the end and to let you know that the recording will be up and certainly by the beginning of next week.

So do look out for that, do share it with friends. I would like to thank all the speakers. I've thoroughly enjoyed today's session.

So it's been a real honour to to be involved and to be able to listen to such learned members of our profession, but I will leave it to Pat, who is obviously the president of the WVA to make some closing remarks and to close the session. Thanks, Pat. So as we've heard from our speakers and panellists, 2020 has been a year of challenge, but also opportunity for the global veterinary profession because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our communities have been responding at many levels to support human and animal health and public health, as well as veterinary student training, and it's also developing plans to meet future pandemics and challenges in 2021 and beyond. We've heard that it is critical to use this pandemic to keep our governments and public in general aware of the critical role and capacity of veterinarians in tackling global one health and one welfare efforts. I'd really like to thank all of our speakers and panellists today for their excellent talks and thoughtful comments, as well as our partner associations represented today by the OIE, FEE, and IBSA, our sponsors and our member associations for their continued support.

I'd also really like to thank the webinar vet team and Doctor Steve Noga from the WDA Secretariat for organising such an informative session today. Finally, I want to thank you, our attendees and participants for your continued commitment and involvement with your students, patients, communities, and the WDA during these challenging times and as we look forward to 2021. Veterinary professionals around the world should feel proud of their ability to adapt and move forward to protect and care for animals and people despite these challenging times.

So stay healthy and safe until we meet next. Thank you.