Hyderabad: BioAsia to focus on challenges and opportunities in post Covid world

Hyderabad: Asia's largest life-sciences and healthcare forum BioAsia would be focusing on the challenges and opportunities in the post-Covid world during its 19th edition to be held virtually.

The 19th edition of BioAsia would be held virtually on February 24 and 25. The conference would delve into COVID-19, and would address one of the most pertinent issues that are looming large across the globe. As the pandemic continues to unfold, fresh threats from COVID-19 variants continue to emerge and chain with debt and inflation, thus causing a global economic slowdown.

According to World Bank's global economic prospect report, global growth is expected to decelerate from 5.5 percent in 2021 to 4.1 percent in 2022. As per the report, the growth would further fall to 3.2 percent in 2023 as pent-up demand dissipates and as fiscal and monetary support is unwound across the world. However, the hard hitting effects were more obvious on global health. According to latest WHO data, as of February 10, 2022, the virus recorded over 399 million cases with 5.7 million deaths attributed to it.

The BioAsia aims to deliberate on the pandemic, the learnings, progress made so far and also discuss on the future of health care to support and enable global collective recovery to pivot beyond the pandemic. It would deliberate the role of different organizations in intensifying focus on medical technology, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals to combat not only the health implications of the pandemic but also its impact on the economy. Vaccines have been the most effective tool that has helped in the global fight against Covid-19 and the vaccine industry has responded to this unprecedented challenge by delivering safe and effective vaccines in a record timeline, which saved millions of lives.

Industries Minister KT Rama Rao said that Hyderabad emerged as a leader in the global fight against COVID pandemic and building on the leadership position, Telangana has taken over the paramount role of bringing eminent stakeholders and deliberating on one of the most important topics of these times related to the challenges, successes, and the way forward with 2 years into the pandemic.