Coronavirus that began to spread in China engulfed the whole world, in no time. it has turned into a global pandemic encompassing the extremes of the east and the west alike. The deadly contagious disease has already infected around 1.4 million people with a death toll of above 70,000. It seems that the world is facing an existential crisis.
The spread of Coronavirus can be situated in the big picture of grave 21st-century challenges the world is facing, from environmental degradation and geopolitical tensions.
It has highlighted the vulnerabilities of the world we live in. But unfortunately, nobody seems to be paying any attention to them.
Key Highlights of The Crisis
- Covid-19 has brought even the so-called developed countries to knees. The healthcare systems of Italy, Spain, USA, etc have crumbled under the immense number of patients.
- It has called into question the nature of development that a lot of developed countries had priorly bragged about.
- With the whole world going through a lockdown, a global economic crisis seems already in the offing. IMF has warned that the world is heading into a recession worse than the subprime crisis of 2008.
- The global governance architecture has failed like never before. The role of the World Health Organization in preventing the spread of the disease has been brought into question. Some have already alleged that it has a clever bias when it comes to China.
- The response to Coronavirus has remained nationalistic and in a certain sense jingoistic. No efforts have been made for a combined international response. This is going to aggravate the trend of ‘deglobalization’ across the world.
These are the times which require leaders who are internationalists in vision and globalist in action but unfortunately we have seen none on the horizon. This is the reason why we have not learnt any lessons from the crisis and remain oblivious to what is right before our eyes.
Lessons To Be Learnt
Coronavirus has completely overhauled the functioning of the world. It has called into question our way of life that is antithetical to the idea of sustainable coexistence with nature.
In the greed for accumulating more and more wealth, we have destroyed nature beyond repair. Nature has always been clear about what is acceptable and what is not. But we crossed those lines and effectively destroyed the buffers that existed between us and nature. As a result problems of great concern arose in the form of global warming, ocean acidification, melting glaciers etc. The spread of infectious diseases is also one of the consequences
I see coronavirus as not something natural but as a man-made disaster. Until the countries and their people learn it, the world will be facing the worse in one form or the other in the upcoming years.
Human beings are an integral part of nature and exist as one more form of biodiversity. We are not in any manner superior to nature but need to live harmoniously with it.
Secondly, all problems that the world is going to face are transnational in nature. No country is insulated from these challenges. So there is a need to strengthen the structure of global governance architecture and multilateralism and increase international cooperation to deal with these challenges.
Now coming to globalization, there are some people who called Covid-19 a repercussion of globalization. This assumption is flawed because interconnectedness has become our way of life. Any attempt to resist it would be futile. I see globalization as the only solution to such a kind of challenge. It is clear that no country possesses all the resources to deal with it. By but combining them, the best medical practices, top-notch containment strategies, and innovations, we can together defeat the virus.
The post-corona world would look very different. Life would need to begin from scratch. Once the crisis is over, nature would be healed to some extent. There are already evidences of improving air quality in cities, faster recovery of the Ozone layer, etc.
It would be up to us to decide what course of action we want to choose, either to continue along this path of destruction or to learn from this, crucial lessons that have been made loud and clear.
In the end, I wish for all my readers a healthy life. Keep washing your hands and practice social distancing. Let’s pray for those who are suffering and wish for them a speedy recovery.