While the COVID-19 crisis has upended our way of living and working, its chaos has brought with it some clarity.

In this ASEAN exclusive, Francesco Alberti speaks to Vincenzo Amendola, Italian Minister for European Affairs to better understand the European Union’s response to the deadly coronavirus pandemic that is sweeping Europe and the rest of the world.The European Union (EU) is facing a pivotal moment in its history.

The COVID-19 virus first appeared as a local outbreak in Wuhan, China, and turned into a pandemic within months, hitting all parts of the world unprecedentedly. Indonesia is no exception; as per 5 May, the country has reported over 12,071 COVID-19 cases, resulting in 872 deaths according to data from the Indonesia COVID-19 Task Force.

I had been captive in Afghanistan for about two weeks when the government of my home country, Canada, contacted those attempting to negotiate my release. They told negotiators to get me on the phone the next day, when the United States (US) military would be flying a drone over where they thought I was being held, in order to determine my whereabouts.The negotiators were unable to secure that concession.

The COVID-19 crisis has brought economies around the world to a standstill. Huge swaths of manufacturing have been idled, and sectors such as aviation and tourism are largely shuttered. Amid all the economic ruin, some have pointed to a supposed silver lining: cleaner air.

The blame game has begun. The number of COVID-19 victims is still unknown, but there is a stream of hate and misinformation pervading timelines. The damage of disinformation and the virus itself to families and communities is equal to our failure to ensure that science, not rhetoric, shapes policy.Studies show that it is more common for viruses to be transmitted from animals to humans. Some erroneously say this is due to innocuous human errors.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana famously quipped in 1905. It is a phrase that has been repeated for over a century, but rarely heeded. As COVID-19 decimates the global economy, our understanding of history could be the difference between a V- or U-shaped recession and a W-shaped one, in which incipient recovery is followed by successive relapses.As recently as March, V-shaped recoveries in individual economies seemed plausible.

It has now become evident that the COVID-19 pandemic is much more than just a global problem for the healthcare sector. The pandemic has triggered a chain of events that has affected other sectors and has led to immense issues such as economic and social security. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a morality flaw in our society.

The COVID-19 coronavirus has spread across the globe at an alarming pace with ominous consequences. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic, where approximately 210 countries have been affected. The COVID-19 virus has infected over 3.4 million people, with more than 230,000 deaths globally. In Indonesia, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases have crossed the 10,000 mark with 800 coronavirus-related deaths.