After becoming a threat to the entire world, as the World Health Organization says, the coronavirus has started to remind us that we live on one planet and that we are exposed to the same illnesses. It reminds us that we face the same outcomes and risks, including death, in critical circumstances. It stands before anyone who is infected with the same anxious anticipation of finding a vaccine or cure.
A global state of panic. Airports are closed for travelers, stocks have collapsed, an exceptional recession is predicted to hit the world economy. Stock markets are lamenting their luck against this pandemic that the world was neither prepared for nor expecting. Suddenly, the entire global population found that the technological advancements that it enjoys are not useful against this violent attack that spread from the meat and seafood market in Wuhan.
What country or religion you belong to and how large your bank account is, no longer matters in confronting the coronavirus. Most of those infected live in developed countries including China, Europe and the United States, and are from the middle class or above. Europeans and Chinese. Americans and Arabs. Koreans and Iranians. Some people live in poorer countries whether in Asia or Africa and have not put fighting the pandemic as their highest priority. Even the WHO's recommendations don't find their way to being implemented in countries like this, hiding the number of cases and the extent of spread. Some states consider the recommendations an intervention in their internal affairs and how they deal with their citizens.
The reason may be that the virus is the simplest misfortune that could hit people in these countries, compared to the miserable living conditions that they experience. It may also be that these governments do not care for monitoring pandemics and their spread or find ways to combat the spread.
With the coronavirus becoming a pandemic, confronting it requires solidarity, as it forces countries to redraw their bounderies and intensify border checks, countering the globalization that living in a "global village" requires. Even in the European Union, where internal borders are open, they are now being monitored. For example, France and Austria have intensified border checks on Italy where the number of cases surpasses the number of cases in all other European countries combined. The same thing has happened between Europe and the US where President Donald Trump issued a decree preventing all Europeans excluding the United Kingdom and Ireland from entering the United States in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus in his country that has recorded around 1,300 cases so far.
Perhaps the global panic has something to do with the restrictions that precautionary measures have imposed on our lives, including travel inside and outside our countries, or forcing us to stay home to isolate ourselves, or changing our social lives in terms of going out and hitting restaurants or clubs and so on.
This situation at such a large scale does not happen other than in world wars. And despite this panic, dealing with the coronavirus becomes more realistic when it is compared to other pandemics and their impact. A hundred years ago, in 1918, influenza infected around 500 million people worldwide (one-third of the global population back then) and around 50 million people died, the majority of whom were from developing countries. More recently, in 2009, another wave of influenza, named H1N1, killed around 600,000 people. In comparison, the coronavirus has infected 126,000 people so far and has killed 4,600, the majority of which were caused by weak immune systems that have to do with old age and other pre-existing health conditions.
This comparison becomes more substantial when we remember that the spread of a pandemic is easier today than it was a hundred years ago considering the means of transportation available between countries, which cause the transmission of the virus, to begin with, from China to Europe and Iran, and then to Arab countries and the rest of the world.
Speaking of the coronavirus, it is worth noting that China has proven how powerful it is in threatening the planet, the economy, and how people live. Not only as a rising economic power but as a country capable of exporting a dangerous pandemic that unsettles the western world and its economy.
Wuhan, an important financial and economic center in China is compared to Chicago. This centrality has facilitated the spread of the virus as a result of being very well connected to other Chinese cities and the world. Ironically, now that the entire world is rushing to fight the pandemic that is rising by the day, the Chinese President rushed to Wuhan to announce that the spread of the virus has started to decline in China and that it has nearly been exterminated. China did what no other country could. It first spread the virus then instituting strict measures to stop its spread that most Western countries wouldn't dare to do.
