Covid pandemic has put pressure on health system, which is a critical infrastructure (official Arafat)

The head of the Department for Emergency Situations, Raed Arafat, drew attention on Thursday to the need for states to learn together the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and said that otherwise there could be more serious situations.

"We need to implement solutions that we have found in the crisis situations of the two years and prepare for even worse scenarios and be better prepared. If the pandemic was, as I said, a slap on our cheek, with a mortality of 2-3%, a new pandemic can be a punch in the face, with a mortality of 20%. If we are not prepared together for this after the lessons learned, we will have a more difficult situation than the pandemic we have passed," Raed Arafat said at the Critical Infrastructure Protection Forum at the Parliament Palace, Agerpres informs.

"We have witnessed, in the two years of the pandemic, from hybrid attacks to misinformation to 'fake news'. Everything that could happen happened in the pandemic. And the pandemic has shown us that although we have the cooperation mechanisms, we must strengthen our own resources beyond what we had," the DSU executive added.

Arafat said that when the risks are great "we must become aware that no one can deal with these things alone."

"The solution is to create mechanisms of cooperation at international level, within which we can work together, we can have common exercises. Here is the essence - not only to collaborate on disasters, but to prepare jointly, before disasters," he said.