The latest findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study published in The Lancet provide new insights on how well countries were prepared in terms of underlying health for the Covid-19 pandemic, and set out the scale of the challenge to protect against new pandemic threats.

The emergence and overlap of the coronavirus pandemic with a continued global rise in chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes - with added environmental risks such as air pollution - have exacerbated the coronavirus death toll.

The world is caught in a perfect storm of rising rates of chronic disease, persistent infectious diseases and public health failures that have fuelled deaths in the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a major global study of human health.