The Group of 20 (G20) leaders urgently need to reconvene to agree on an enhanced and more strongly coordinated global response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The World Bank’s International Comparison Program (ICP) has just released its latest measures of price levels and gross domestic product (GDP) across 176 countries, and the results are striking. For the first time ever, the ICP finds that China’s total real (inflation-adjusted) income is slightly larger than that of the United States (US).

In my final speech as Hong Kong’s governor on 30 June, 1997, a few hours before I left the city on Britain’s royal yacht, I remarked that, “Now, Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is the promise. And that is the unshakable destiny.”That promise was contained in the 1984 Joint Declaration, a treaty signed by China and the United Kingdom (UK) and lodged at the United Nations (UN).

Public opinion in the United States (US) pins the blame for the COVID-19 pandemic squarely on China. After all, that’s where the virus started. And President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have fanned the flames by accusing China of covering up the outbreak and knowingly allowing the novel coronavirus to spread.

Among its many other effects, the COVID-19 crisis has intensified the pre-existing geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States (US). This tension has led many to warn of the “Thucydides trap,” a term coined by Harvard’s Graham T Allison to refer to the heightened risk of conflict when an emerging power threatens to displace an established one.

Last month, Sheuly rushed into a Dhaka hospital in need of emergency treatment. The 25-year-old Bangladeshi woman had just given birth at home – thinking it a safer setting than the hospital during a pandemic. But as she began to suffer from post-partum haemorrhage – one of the leading causes of maternal death worldwide – avoiding exposure to COVID-19 was the furthest thing from her mind.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the first major global crisis in human history to be treated as a mathematical problem, with governments regarding policy as the solution to a set of differential equations. Excluding a few outliers – including, of course, United States (US) President Donald Trump – most political leaders have slavishly deferred to “the science” in tackling the virus.

The Seychelles, a string of 115 verdant, rocky islands in the Indian Ocean, recently announced – in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic – that it would protect 30 percent of its glittering turquoise waters from commercial use.Safeguarding some 410,000 square kilometres (158,000 square miles) of the sea will benefit wildlife on the shore and in the water, including 100,000 giant tortoises and some of the world’s last pristine coral reefs.

While many countries continue to grapple with escalating COVID-19 outbreaks, two have declared theirs effectively over: New Zealand and Iceland. It is no coincidence that both countries’ governments are led by women.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Icelandic counterpart Katrín Jakobsdóttir have both received considerable – and well-deserved – praise for their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis.