Events like the COVID-19 pandemic, the US housing-market crash of 2007-2009, and the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001, are often called “black swans.” The term is meant to suggest that no one could have seen them coming.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s behaviour over the past two weeks is exactly what’s wrong with America’s response to COVID-19. Paul has a compromised lung, so he decided that he should be tested for the disease out of an abundance of caution. From the time of his test until he was confirmed positive six days later, Paul did nothing to protect those around him.
COVID-19 is ravaging advanced economies such as Italy, France, Spain, and the United States (US).
No health system in the world has the surge capacity to cope with an influx of tens of thousands of patients in a matter of weeks, as is the case with the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of a few weeks ago, no one would have disputed that the most relevant and evident trend in the global politics of our times is “go national.” Unilateralism and “zero-sum game” logic seemed to be the new normal: “For me to win, I need you to lose” and “Me first.” These phrases seemed to be the unequivocal and almost uncontested trademark of this century.
Of all the challenges that humans have faced over millennia, disease has always been a particularly brutal and resourceful enemy.The impact of disease has shaped history. Amerindians were ravaged by illnesses that the Spanish conquistadors brought to Mexico and South America; the “stout Cortez” of John Keats’s poem was accompanied by killer diseases like smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus.
The new COVID-19 coronavirus has spread to more than 100 countries – bringing social disruption, economic damage, sickness, and death – largely because authorities in China, where it emerged, initially suppressed information about it.
I was recently walking along East 29th Street in Manhattan, after visiting a friend at Bellevue Hospital, when I was roused from my thoughts by a middle-aged white male screaming at an old Chinese man, “Get the f**k out of my country, you piece of Chinese s**t!” The old man was stunned. So was I, before I bellowed back (deploying the full range of my native Australian vocabulary), “F**k off and leave him alone, you white racist piece of s**t!” The pedestrian traffic stopped.
At the start of this year, things seemed to be looking up for the global economy. True, growth had slowed a bit in 2019: from 2.9 percent to 2.3 percent in the United States (US), and from 3.6 percent to 2.9 percent globally.
The coronavirus outbreak that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan has spread across the country and beyond its borders, leaving governments at all levels in China scrambling to limit further person-to-person transmission of the virus, now known as COVID-19. Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, is under lockdown.
The coronavirus crisis represents the single biggest challenge for Xi Jinping since he became general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012. Individuals and families across China are living in fear. Multiple Chinese provinces are under virtual lockdown. The virus has brought significant parts of the economy to a grinding halt, as firms instruct their employees to work from home.
From United States (US) Republicans’ effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s right to an abortion, to Poland’s increased restrictions on access to emergency contraception, to Brazil’s clampdown on sexual health education, this is a difficult time for women. But if the global feminist movement has proved anything over the years, it is that it can overcome powerful resistance to defend the rights of marginalised groups.
