April 15, 2020
But this is all a double-edged sword; the glories that have come from our intricate global society have put us in a situation where the actions of individuals continents away have very real, and possibly potent, impacts upon our lives. A drone strike on a Saudi Arabian oil production facility could raise global oil prices by 19.5%, affecting average consumers in the US; a civil war in Syria could start a decade-long refugee crisis in the European Union, leading to the Brexit of the United Kingdom so they could “take back control” of their borders; and, most pressingly today, a person in a wet market in Wuhan, China, could be infected with a virus, beginning the exponential spread of COVID-19, which, at the time of this article, has infected some 2,000,000 and killed almost 130 thousand, leading to entire countries shutting down indefinitely and trillions being wiped off the stock market.
It is in this setting of unprecedented fear where a controversial view on what can be seen as one of the greatest pandemics since the Spanish Flu (1918-2020) may be offered: Coronavirus is a triumph for civilization.
Above all, the leaders of the world were not prepared for a pandemic of any kind. Despite wargames and hypothetical pandemic briefings, many of the governments of the world did not act with the measure and precision necessary to combat the global blitzkrieg of COVID-19. Even today, the Trump administration offers conflicting messages on how to deal with the virus: the president has previously pushed to have the country “opened up by Easter,” and yet has also extended social distancing guidelines to April 30th. We knew that Coronavirus was coming months ago, but we did nothing.
It is because of this indecision and lack of leadership — not just in the United States, but in the world over — that Coronavirus has been allowed to spread so fast and disrupt so much. It is because of this indecision and lack of leadership that the world is certainly in a recession (how bad it will be and for how long is unknown); it is because of this lack of action that more than seventeen million Americans have filed for unemployment over the past four weeks as stores are forced to shut down; it is because of this lack of global reactionary and premeditated response that hundreds millions of people, without unprecidented action, are predicted to get COVID-19 by the year’s end.
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