Crises are opportunities to grow, to develop, to emerge from chaos with a new, more complex and responsive order. However, crises, whether individual or social, do not in themselves guarantee progress and learning; there must be a conscious effort to identify lessons and a strong determination to make adjustments to unhelpful patterns of behaviour and institutional dynamics, writes Augusto Lopez-Claros, Chair of the Global Governance Forum.
The COVID-19 crisis is the largest shock to the global economy since the 2008-09 global financial crisis, maybe since the Great Depression of the early 1930s. To avoid overwhelming their health care systems governments have sought to slow down the spread of the virus by implementing various suppression policies. They have made the case that social distancing measures are central to these efforts, as shown by the experience of Finland, Norway, Iceland, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Uruguay, and Taiwan where various combinations of lockdowns, testing and contact tracing appear to have slowed down—sometimes dramatically—the rate of infections.
Some lessons
What are some of the early lessons that can be drawn from the various country experiences thus far? The list that follows is an attempt to identify some key issues; how we internalise in coming years the ramifications of this crisis is tremendously important for prosperity and human development.
Improving public health systems. It is evident that COVID-19 has found most countries with woefully unprepared public health facilities: not enough hospital beds, not enough respirators and other vital equipment forcing painful rationing choices. Some would argue that it will never be possible to be fully prepared for a highly contagious air-borne virus. But this misses the point. Some such pandemic has been widely anticipated, with some scientists arguing that it was only a matter of time before EBOLA, SARS and MERS were followed by something like the coronavirus. Highly unprepared public health systems raises the question of budgetary priorities and whether governments are doing enough to take a hard look at the structure of public spending and ask themselves whether it is consistent with adequate levels of public health and the overall needs of the economy.
Furthermore, the fact that individual country experiences have sharply differed in terms of health outcomes suggests the need for a thorough assessment of the state of the health care systems across the world and what needs to be done to empower them to deal more effectively with the next crisis. The Spanish government has announced the establishment of a commission to do precisely this and a strong case can be made for the World Health Organization (WHO) to take the lead role in this area, given the global nature of the pandemic.