Humanitarians are sounding the alarm about the likely impact of Covid-19 on countries and communities already grappling with crises. Death rates – estimated at 1% in high-income countries with well-equipped hospitals – will likely climb when the virus spreads to South Sudan, Syria or Yemen, where health systems have collapsed and many hospitals lack even the most basic equipment.
So how should humanitarian actors respond? Research by the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) on the humanitarian response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and work by the Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN) on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) suggest five key lessons.

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