FIGHT AGAINST CORONAVIRUS World needs courageous, strong leaders -Abu Tahir Mustakim

Mankind has been facing the most difficult health crisis in history. According to the estimate of Imperial College, London: coronavirus can kill 1 million people in Asia and 300,000 in Africa alone. However, efforts to combat this global crisis are missing.
To cope with this crisis, the first thing we need to do is to invent a simple medicine, for which the laboratories are scrambling, in order to prevent the infection of this virus and save millions of lives.
The second important thing is to find out global leadership. The leadership that will provide the support needed to create those drugs. Statistics show that in the richest countries, there is only one hospital bed for every seven critical patients. The situation of the poor and developing countries is easily perceived.
Healthcare systems in these countries are poor and social security inadequate. They need at least $35 billion in funding the invention of therapy for or a vaccine against COVID-19, medical personnel and national stability. If nothing is done to prevent the spread of the pandemic in poor countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the consequences will be dire. The pandemic will spread through the world at another time through them.
Third, strong measures need to be taken to prevent the economies from collapsing in the coronavirus world. Although governments try to prevent the economic downturn, in real terms they are freezing. Therefore, the economy, financial management and business measures must be taken on an urgent basis so that today’s recession does not become a crisis of the next day.
Unless the health emergency is resolved, the economic crisis will not end. And only if a particular country’s illness is taken into consideration, it will not cut the health emergency. This emergency can only end when all countries are free of coronavirus and there is no fear of its return.
For the poorest countries, special financial assistance should be provided. The international community will have to waive the debt repayments of developing countries this year. Instead, it is important to provide $ 150 billion to sustain the developing economies.
An international cooperation with required wealth and manpower in the fight against coronavirus is sadly absent. Effective leadership is needed for this cooperation.
On March 26, leaders of the world’s wealthiest countries, G-20, held a videoconference. The organisation controls all 90 percent of global GDP. The G-20 was originally developed to tackle and resolve the global crisis.
However, the videoconference ended without any real commitment, sadly. The leaders called on the countries concerned to control the pandemic on their own initiative and left the matter to the finance and health ministers.
But the G-20 leaders gathered in Washington on an urgent basis during the global economic crisis in 2008. There they agreed to cooperate in economic policy and economic growth.
Earlier, alliances from different countries have called for donors’ conferences to fund necessary emergencies such as the tsunami, civil war or epidemic. In today’s global emergency, both the donor conference and the need to form a taskforce to coordinate international support on behalf of the G-20 are crucial.
The current pandemic has so far killed more than 110,000 people around the world, but it is different in terms of specialty and horror. The pandemic has created a different situation than the economic crisis or the spread of the Ebola virus. The spread of coronavirus has become a serious threat to the world order by weakening the healthcare system of the western countries and the economic system.
While the virus is killing people in Italy, France, the United States, Spain and the UK at an alarming rate, their leaders do not get the chance to look beyond the border.
Another type of global cooperation is taking its place when different countries are planning to write obituary of multilateralism by closing their borders and locking territories.
As such, scientists around the world are finding new ways to reduce the bureaucratic red tape and exchange epidemiological information, technology and medical methods.
Collaborative work is underway on Facebook, email and web pages to find a drug.
The world is waiting for a clear announcement on the meeting of The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank’s Development Committee to be held from April 17 to 19. This is probably the best way to avoid a crisis. And if they try to avoid this route as expensive, it will have dire consequences. If world leaders fail this time, they will lose a lot.
The writer is a journalist and columnist