From China to Italy and the United States to Australia – coronavirus disease has travelled across the globe, spawned over continents and infected a staggering 500,000 people worldwide. India, home to 1.3 billion people, has hastened its response and bolstered its efforts to fight the deadly contagion. Although global health bodies such as the World Health Organisation have hailed India’s move to initiate the 21-day lockdown, experts suggest working in isolation will not solve the Covid-19 problem at the macro level.
Matthew Jackson, William D Eberle professor of Economics at Stanford’s School of Humanities of Sciences believes that a combined effort by all states and countries is needed to wipe out the virus from the face of the Earth, lest it raises its ugly head again like a disease relapse.
“Managing the crisis requires a comprehensive and coordinated response between states within the US and across countries and continents, otherwise, the problem will continue to surge at a greater cost to the global economy and public health,” said Jackson in a published piece on Stanford’s blog.
BEATING COVID-19
“Without coordination within and across countries we will end up endlessly reacting to resurgences of the virus”.
“Locking areas down is a blunt instrument. It slows the virus down locally, but our research and common sense makes clear that, given the lack of coordination, it is not likely to be successful for long and will end up being extremely costly,” he said.
The efficient way to tackle the spread of the virus would be to meticulously find out the exact point of its eruption and waste no time in dealing with it.
“A combination of basic social distancing, and blanket testing with fast reactions, would involve the least disruption. In the meanwhile, as we devote all necessary resources to make tests more widely available, and push hard on developing a vaccine, we need to coordinate internationally on our containment strategies,” Jackson noted.
The expert noted that lack of coordination, both within a country as well as with its international partners, will yield a lopsided result in tackling the Covid-19 crisis. In this manner, while one area will be striving hard to control the virus and minimising the number of cases, it will continue to grow and multiply somewhere else.Once it is under control in the first area, it can return from another area. An analogy is trying to get rid of termites in a house. There is a reason they fumigate the whole house all at once, even if only a few parts of it show large infestations,” the blog read.
Logically speaking, a country can’t remain in a state of lockdown for a long period, we cannot seal our borders completely. “Thus, without coordination within and across countries we will end up endlessly reacting to resurgences of the virus”.
More than 24,000 people have died due to the Sars-CoV-2 virus across the world with Italy standing at the top with 8,215 deaths, followed by Spain (4,365) and China (3,169). The United States is now emerging as the new epicentre of the virus with cases going beyond what China has reported. According to the latest data shared by Johns Hopkins University, America now has more than 85,600 positive Covid-19 cases. China has reported under 82,000 cases till date.