Covid-19: A challenge, but an opportunity too
It’s a pandemic now, though a “controllable” one. The World Health Organisation has declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, literally means affecting everybody, for two reasons, according to its secretarygeneral Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: the alarming levels of the spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction. The move was triggered by the sudden increase in the number of people infected by the disease and the death toll in the last 24 hours. Italy, one of the worst affected, reported 194 deaths on Wednesday, taking the toll to 827. In Iran, 62 more lost their lives, taking the toll to 354. Some 127,000 cases have been reported from 120 countries and territories and over 4,700 people have died. WHO fears the number of cases, deaths and affected nations could climb higher.
WHO’s concerns on governmental inaction are well-founded. It’s ironic that on the day WHO alerted the world on the impending threat, the United States shut itself off almost completely from the world. President Donald J. Trump has consistently been in denial mode, saying first that the coronavirus outbreak will be gone by April as “the heat kills this kind of virus” and then playing it down, comparing the Covid-19 statistics with that of the flu. World media reports talk very poorly of America’s preparedness to tackle the escalating crisis, costing precious time for health workers. Experts suggest the virus had reached Italy in mid-January, but that country failed to identify it, leading eventually to its spread to every region and a virtual lockdown of the north. Iran initially boasted that the virus wouldn’t touch it, and even suggested it could export masks to China. South Korea failed to spread the necessary information on the disease, that led to a religious congregation becoming the epicentre of the epidemic.
But all is not lost. WHO hopes to bring it down to a “controlled pandemic” if countries step up measures to tackle it. There are successful models all over. On Thursday, a day after WHO’s announcement, news came from China’s Wuhan that it closed all makeshift hospitals it had opened to treat Covid-19 patients. India, which has reported 74 cases with no deaths, has announced a series of steps to tackle it. Kerala has developed an exhaustive protocol to trace the infected; the Union health secretary is understood to have advised other states to follow it. It’s time WHO led other nations in picking up the best practices from around the world and made them available to all. The pandemic’s economic cost is yet to be determined. Stock markets worldwide are in peril. The impact will be more on poorer countries; Iran has already asked the IMF to extend it a loan to fight the disease.
The coronavirus outbreak is no more a regional affair, and it demands that the world to pull together all its resources — financial, scientific, communications — in the fight. It’s a challenge, as well as an opportunity, for humanity to remain united and fight the common enemy.