While progress has been made toward the 2030 goal to end TB, gaps persist between aspirations and the current situation.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a much less headline-grabbing disease was responsible for the majority of infectious disease deaths: tuberculosis. In 2020 alone, it killed 1.5 million people according to the World Health Organization’s latest “Global Tuberculosis Report.” The same year, COVID-19 claimed the lives of 1.7 million people but received wall-to-wall media coverage — and much more attention and investment than TB.