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COVID-19 Should Make Us Re-imagine the World Order
As a bio-security crisis brings the world to a brink, the dominant neo-liberal vision of world order must be displaced by a humane globalism and institutions that actually supply public goods.
The COVID-19 or the novel corona virus could not have broken out at a worse time. A slowing global economy, a fraying international order, social discontent and political apathy across countries, and then topped off with a global pandemic threatening peoples and communities across 120 countries. Worse case scenarios paint a frightening spectre. If we assume 30%–70% infection rate of the world’s population and a fatality rate of 3%, the result would be nearly 70–165 million fatalities. The previous such virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) killed fewer than 800 people at a fatality rate of 10% of those it infected. SARS appears a mild episode compared to what we have witnessed so far this year. The ease of transmission between humans and the mildness or undetectability of its early symptoms, particularly in the young, makes COVID-19 deadly and unprecedented.
Across the world, authorities are grappling to contain the virus with degraded or underfunded public health systems. It is a race against time, with containment the only option before a viable cure is invented and made available on a large scale. But, it is also the spillover of this pandemic on to global politics and geo-economics that could upset calculations of strategists everywhere.
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