DevelopmentAid Bi-weekly review of the coronavirus pandemic

BySergiu Ipatii

DevelopmentAid Bi-weekly review of the coronavirus pandemic

(September 9 – 24, 2020)

“None of us is safe until all of us are safe” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday, September 22, delivering his speech to the 75th session of the UN General Assembly. The official admitted the event to be “the strangest sight of all in a world turned upside down” since most of the world’s leaders did not attend the annual gathering at the organization’s headquarters, known as the General Debate, but pre-recorded their speeches on video instead.

Guterres used the occasion to highlight the biggest challenges currently faced by humanity naming, among others, climate change, armed conflicts, gender inequality, “21st century multilateralism” and the COVID-19 pandemic. The UN official also warned the world about what he called “vaccinationalism”. According to him, countries are reportedly making “side deals” for future COVID-19 vaccines for their own populations.

A day earlier, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu, the chief of the World Health Organization, unveiled a plan to have two billion doses of coronavirus vaccine available by the end of 2021 through the Vaccines Global Access Facility, or COVAX. Today, roughly 64% of the global population lives in a nation that has either committed to, or is eligible to join, COVAX.

When speaking about “vaccine nationalism”, the WHO chief put it bluntly: “We sink or we swim together”.  

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu added, “Vaccine nationalism will only perpetuate the disease and prolong global recovery”.

Coronavirus deepens the divide between nations and between people

As of September 22, there were more than 31 million cases of the COVID-19 worldwide, with over 962,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization and the disease continues to severely affect populations around the globe.

The International Labor Organization has published an analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on the labor market. The findings were rather alarming: a “massive” drop in labor income and a fiscal stimulus gap that threatens to increase inequality between richer and poorer countries was revealed.

People are working less hours due to the pandemic’s impact on businesses while workers in developing and emerging economies, particularly those in the informal sector, have been much more affected by the coronavirus.

Another finding of the analysis concerns the correlation between fiscal stimulus and working hours.

Thus, preliminary findings based on the data from certain countries reveal a clear correlation showing that the larger the fiscal stimulus (as a percentage of GDP), the lower the working hour losses although not all countries have benefitted from this correlation. While high-income countries have concentrated on fiscal stimulus packages, emerging and developing economies have limited capacity to finance such measures.

“In order for developing countries to reach the same ratio of stimulus to working hours lost as in high-income countries, they would need to inject a further US$982 billion (US$45 billion in low-income countries and US$937 billion in lower-middle income countries)” concluded the authors of the analysis.

However, some companies are apparently less affected by the pandemic. Oxfam America’s briefing paper entitled Power, Profits and the Pandemic, published on September 10 ahead of the six-month anniversary of the declaration of the pandemic, outlines “how COVID-19 has made things even worse by encouraging corporations around the globe to put profits before workers’ safety, push costs and risks down the supply chain and use their political influence to shape policy responses”.

The paper suggests that companies have aggravated the economic impacts of the pandemic by paying dividends to shareholders instead of investing in better jobs and climate-friendly technology, paying their fair share of taxes and prioritizing profits over people.

United we stand

The United Nations has pushed for a rescue package to get economies back up and running. The UN Secretary General even called the package “massive”, equivalent to roughly 10% of global economic output.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres: “Developed countries can afford it”

“But we need to ensure that the developing world does not fall into financial ruin, escalating poverty and debt crises,” he stated. “We need a collective commitment to avoid a downward spiral.”

To this end, the Secretary-General will convene world leaders for a meeting next Tuesday, September 29 to find solutions to finance development in the COVID-19 era and beyond.

About COVID-2019

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in many different species of animals including camels, cattle, cats and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between them such as was the case with MERS (2012) and SARS (2003).The symptoms of the virus are very similar to those of a common cold – runny nose, headache, cough, sore throat, fever, a general feeling of being unwell. Blood tests are necessary in order to prove the presence of the virus in the organism.

Named by scientists as the “Wuhan seafood market pneumonia virus”,  COVID-19 is a coronavirus, like MERS and SARs, all of which have their origins in bats. Initial reports show that, in the early stages of the outbreak (early January 2020), many of those infected in Wuhan had some link to a large seafood and live animal market – the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, mainly its western wing where wildlife animals are traded. This suggests that the virus initially affected an animal and subsequently spread to a person in a what a CDC has called “the species barrier jump”.