World leaders were yesterday set to hold online crisis talks on the COVID-19 pandemic that has forced 3 billion people into lockdown and claimed more than 21,000 lives.
With the disease tearing around the globe at a terrifying pace, warnings are multiplying over its economic consequences, with experts saying it could cause more damage than the Great Depression.
Amid squabbling between the leaders of China and the US over who is to blame, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for the world to act together to halt the menace.
Photo: AFP
“COVID-19 is threatening the whole of humanity,” Guterres said. “Global action and solidarity are crucial. Individual country responses are not going to be enough.”
The global lockdown — which also took in India’s huge population this week — tightened further yesterday when Russia announced it was grounding all international flights, while Moscow’s mayor ordered the closure of cafes, shops and parks.
Tokyo’s millions of citizens have been told to stay at home and tourism-dependent Thailand has shuttered its borders.
Economists say the restrictions imposed around the world could cause the biggest recession in modern history.
“The G20 economies will experience an unprecedented shock in the first half of this year and will contract in 2020 as a whole,” ratings agency Moody’s said.
The leaders of the G20 major economies were due to hold a virtual meeting later yesterday in the shadow of such dire predictions.
“As the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic, and the challenges to healthcare systems and the global economy, we convene this extraordinary G20 summit to unite efforts towards a global response,” Saudi Arabian King Salman wrote on Twitter.
Saudi Arabia holds the rotating G20 presidency.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said richer nations needed to offer support to low and middle-income countries.
The devastating effect on poorer nations was laid bare when the Philippines announced that nine front-line doctors had died after contracting COVID-19.
Three large Manila hospitals this week said that they had reached capacity and would no longer accept new coronavirus cases.
Hundreds of medical staff are undergoing 14-day self-quarantines after suspected exposure, the hospitals said.
The death toll from the coronavirus, which emerged in Wuhan, China, last year, continued to grow, with the US becoming the sixth nation to hit four figures.
Almost 1,050 people are now known to have died in the US, with nearly 70,000 infections, Johns Hopkins University data showed.
Globally, the number of infections is closing in on half a million.
The rocketing infection rate in the US has sparked a rush to buy weapons, gun store owners said, with customers panicking about societal breakdown.
“A lot of people are buying shotguns, handguns, AR-15 [semi-automatic rifles], everything,” said Tiffany Teasdale, who sells guns in Washington state. “A lot of people are scared that someone is going to break into their home ... to steal cash, their toilet paper, their bottled water, their food.”
About half of the US population is under lockdown, but US President Donald Trump said that he would decide soon whether unaffected parts of the nation could get back to work.
The White House has repeatedly lashed out at Beijing over the disease.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday said that the G7 were united against China’s “disinformation” campaign.
A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman had infuriated Washington by suggesting on Twitter that US troops had taken the coronavirus to Wuhan.
“Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place,” Pompeo told reporters.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
Conflict with Taiwan could leave China with “massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions,” a US think tank said in a report released on Monday. The German Marshall Fund released a report titled If China Attacks Taiwan: The Consequences for China of “Minor Conflict” and “Major War” Scenarios. The report details the “massive” economic, military, social and international costs to China in the event of a minor conflict or major war with Taiwan, estimating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could sustain losses of more than half of its active-duty ground forces, including 100,000 troops. Understanding Chinese
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
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