Pandemic Highlights WHO’s Underlying Weakness: It Doesn’t Have Authority To Implement Global Response
The basic premise of the organization is that it serves as a global coordinator. But even as the organization attempts to fulfill that role in the current pandemic, its efforts have fallen largely flat and there's been a lack of a unified global response to the crisis. Meanwhile, China continues to grapple with the fallout from the outbreak, both politically and socially.
For weeks, the World Health Organization resisted declaring the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, fearing that doing so would incite panic across the globe. But facing the cameras on Wednesday, the agency鈥檚 director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, did just that, asking for global unity to 鈥渃hange the course of this pandemic.鈥 It was a symbolic moment that underscored the standing of the W.H.O. as the world鈥檚 leading public health agency. But it also reflected the W.H.O.鈥檚 underlying weakness as an organization that by international treaty is supposed to lead and coordinate the global fight against coronavirus 鈥 yet that has, in many ways, been marginalized. (Gebrekidan, 3/12)
As China grows more optimistic about containing the spread of coronavirus within the country, it is confronting a potential threat to its recovery: the rest of the world. Epidemic-control efforts have turned to foreigners in China in recent days as confirmed cases within the country have slowed. Police officers and local government workers have made house calls specifically to check whether expatriates recently traveled to another country where they could have contracted the virus. (Yang and Woo, 3/12)
As Xi Jinping toured the coronavirus-stricken city of Wuhan this week, setting the tone for an official narrative that China will win a "People's War", numerous social media users went to extraordinary lengths to make an alternative voice heard. The effort to get around China's censors and publish the words of Wuhan doctor Ai Fen, the first to sound the alarm over the virus, was among the most elaborate in an outpouring of dissent against the government narrative as the outbreak exacts a devastating human and economic toll. (3/13)
From quarantining arriving travelers from overseas to nabbing those sneaking in with fevers, China and other parts of Asia are scrambling to prevent the new coronavirus from coming back to where it first broke out. Just as the spread of the disease is stabilizing in much of Asia, following a major outbreak in China and sizable ones in South Korea and Japan, it is popping up in new hot spots around the world. (3/13)
A prominent Chinese official claims the United States military could have brought the novel coronavirus to China -- and it did not originate in the city of Wuhan, as thought. Posting to his more than 300,000 followers on Twitter, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian republished a video of Robert Redfield, the director for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, addressing a US Congressional committee on March 11. In the clip, Redfield said some influenza deaths in the US were later identified as cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. (Westcott and Jiang, 3/13)
Two months into the coronavirus epidemic in China, tens of millions of people are still under quarantine and much of the economy remains in a deep freeze. Yet China has largely succeeded in keeping its stores filled with food and other essentials鈥攅ven in hard-hit places like the city of Wuhan鈥攁 crucial factor in maintaining public order throughout the crisis. (Wernau, 3/13)
As the new coronavirus jumped from country to country in recent weeks, the responses of their governments to the pandemic have highlighted how much national borders still matter in what seemed to be an increasingly borderless world. New travel and trade restrictions are popping up daily, policies that seemed unthinkable until recently and that disrupt economies used to global supply chains. A shortage of pharmaceutical components produced in China and other聽export curbs are already making the fight against the virus and other diseases more difficult. (Trofimov, 3/12)
The youn mothers didn鈥檛 tell their children they had the coronavirus. Mama was working hard, they said, to save sick people. Instead, Deng Danjing and Xia Sisi were fighting for their lives in the same hospitals where they worked, weak from fever and gasping for breath. Within a matter of weeks, they had gone from healthy medical professionals on the front lines of the epidemic in Wuhan, China, to coronavirus patients in critical condition. (Wee and Wang, 3/13)
And elsewhere 鈥
Schools, colleges and childcare facilities will be closed in the Republic of Ireland from Friday as part of a nationwide effort to halt the spread of coronavirus, the country's Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Thursday. The closures will also apply to cultural institutions and will remain in place until March 29. Indoor gatherings of more than 100 people and outdoor gatherings of more than 500 people will also be canceled, he said at a press conference in Washington. (Spary and Alberti, 3/12)
Belgium's聽Prime Minister Sophie Wilm猫s said on Thursday that all schools in the country would suspend classes starting Monday in attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus in the small European nation. While classes would be canceled, schools聽will still be responsible for their pupils if their parents are unable to take off work or if they work in healthcare, according to Politico. (Johnson, 3/12)
