International comparison of pandemic policies in the United States and Japan: Combination of all-hazards and single-hazard approaches as a realistic option to policymaking for public health emergency management system

Abstract

The all-hazards approach (AHA) is a ground concept of crisis management to build common capabilities to deal with diverse hazards and adopted as the standard approach by many countries. The single-hazard approach (SHA), on the other hand, is a concept in which measures are taken specifically for a particular disaster. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has raised a policy debate on the effectiveness of pandemic preparedness in both AHA and SHA regimes, which has yet to be settled. This is because not sufficient studies have been conducted to compare policies under both concepts systematically. In this study, a new analytical framework was developed to compare pandemic policies under AHA and SHA concepts. The framework was designed to analyze coverage of hazards and actions for pandemic preparedness and response in the policy documents. The United States (the U. S.) and Japan were selected as the representative countries adopting AHA and SHA respectively. As a result, we empirically demonstrated for the first time that both countries combined multi-hazards and single-hazard countermeasures. This will provide new alternative solutions for the binary argument between two approaches. We also analyzed the coverage of actions for pandemic preparedness and response and found that while both countries comprehensively scoped overall actions, there were significant differences in coverage of individual actions. These findings may be useful to identify agenda to improve pandemic policies after the COVID-19 in each country and the framework developed in this study provides a new tool contributing to policymaking for crisis management.