PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1651902
This article is part of the Research TopicBuilding Resilient Healthcare: Integrating Economic and Health Policies for Pandemic PreparednessView all 3 articles
Deprioritized and Disrupted: Tuberculosis Care in the Shadow of COVID-19
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
- 2The University of Auckland Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, Auckland, New Zealand
- 3Dartmouth College Geisel School of Medicine, Hanover, United States
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The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted tuberculosis (TB) care worldwide, undermining years of progress in TB prevention and control. This Perspective offers a comparative analysis of how TB services were affected in a high-income, low-burden country (Canada) versus two low- and middle-income, high-burden countries (India and Nigeria). Drawing on secondary data and global surveillance reports, the article highlights key disruptions across the TB care cascade, including delays in diagnosis, reduced case detection, and the collapse of community-based treatment models like DOTS. In Canada, digital transitions partially mitigated the impact, though access was unequal. In contrast, India and Nigeria faced widespread diagnostic interruptions, compounded by preexisting infrastructure gaps and limited digital access. The comparison reveals how underlying health system strength and digital readiness shaped national responses and recovery trajectories. Crucially, the pandemic exposed policy inertia and the deprioritization of routine infectious disease care in crisis contexts. This article calls for a global rethink of public health preparedness that centers on equity, continuity of essential services, and support for highburden settings. By analyzing divergent country experiences, this Perspective contributes actionable insights for strengthening TB programs and public health systems during future pandemics.
Keywords: Tuberculosis, COVID-19, Health Systems, global health equity, public health disruption, India, Canada, Nigeria
Received: 22 Jun 2025; Accepted: 17 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sharma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sushant Sharma, shrisharma2001@gmail.com
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