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The numbers are being closely watched around the world as
China restarts its economy.
The figure is higher than experts were predicting and points
towards a V-shaped recovery - that is, a sharp fall followed
by a quick recovery.
It also means China avoids going into a technical recession
- signified as two consecutive periods of negative growth.
The Chinese economy managed to grow more strongly than
expected as it emerged from the lockdown.
All the stimulus measures announced by the authorities seem
to be working - with factories getting busier, evident in
growth in the industrial production data.
And just as the economy starts to recover, tensions with the
US are flaring up - especially over Hong Kong.
That is why some economists are reluctant to call it a
V-shaped recovery just yet.
As
the pandemic continues to escalate in US, more and media
start to change their reports to a more critical attitude
toward the failure of the government in the west.
Published in the Guardian on July 21st, A review
carried out by Resolve to Save Lives, a part of the global
health group Vital
Strategies, led by Tom Frieden, the former
director of the main US public health agency, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) blames Trump for a
chaotic approach to ‘life-and-death information’
The report says “life-and-death information” is being
pulled together haphazardly by individual states in a way
that is “inconsistent, incomplete and inaccessible in most
locations”. Without such intelligence the country is
effectively walking blind, with very little chance of
getting “our children to school in the fall, ourselves back
to work, our economy restarted, and preventing tens of
thousands of deaths”.
Slow national policy
A report published on the Time on July 1st, by Duke
University professor Gavin Yamey and Clare Wenham from
London School of Economics, start a question on the ranking
of
Global
Health Security Index.
According to the “scorecard” by the Global Health
Security Index on Oct. 24, 2019 -Only 45 days before the
covid-19 case was announced, the US and UK, were the two
best prepared Nations to tackle a Pandemic.
The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to
tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures,
including how quickly a country was likely to respond and
how well its health care system would “treat the sick and
protect health workers.” The U.S. was ranked first out of
195 nations, and the U.K. was ranked second.
The two countries that on paper were the best
prepared to deal with a pandemic turned out by June 2020 to
be two of the world’s biggest failures in tackling COVID-19.
With 122,300
excess deaths—the number of deaths over and above
what would be expected in non-crisis conditions—the U.S.
ranks number 1 on this metric. In second place, with 65,700
excess deaths, is the U.K.
There’s a reason the scorecard got it so wrong: It did not
account for the political context in which a national policy
response to a pandemic is formulated and implemented.
There is an eerie similarity in the appalling political
decisions made by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister
Boris Johnson—two right wing “illiberal
populist” leaders who believed their nations were
invulnerable, generally rejected science, and turned inwards
and away from multilateralism. Their parallel decisions
consigned many of their citizens to the grave.
The United States was slow in recognizing the coronavirus
threat from Europe, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admitted for
the first time July 29 in an interview with ABC News. |