UN Chief: COVID-19, Greatest Test For The World Since 1945
'COVID-19: Greatest Test for the World Since 1945,' says UN Chief, by Joe Lauria, Special to Consortium News, March 31, 2020. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that the coronavirus pandemic is the “greatest test that we have faced together since the formation of the United Nations,” as he called on rich nations to help prevent a devastating outbreak in the global South.
The world is facing the greatest crisis with the Covid-19 pandemic since 1945, when the United Nations was founded, said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday. He said developed nations must help developing countries or the world could “face the nightmare of the disease spreading like wildfire in the global South with millions of deaths and the prospect of the disease re-emerging where it was previously suppressed.”
Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world,” he said.
- UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres
Guterres was speaking from UN headquarters in New York at the launch of a new UN report on the pandemic. The report includes projections from the UN International Labour Organization (ILO), that says 25 million jobs will be lost worldwide, representing a loss of $860 billion to $3.4 trillion in income for workers. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) projected a 30 to 40 percent reduction in global foreign direct investment and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) sees a 20–30 percent fall in international airline arrivals.
“This is a disease that threatens everybody in the world, and it has an economic impact that will bring a recession that probably has no parallel in the recent past,” Guterres said. “Enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, enhanced conflict makes us believe indeed that this is the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War.”
It requires, he said, that nations “forget political games, and understand that it is humankind that is at stake.”
- Decries Lack of Coordination: Guterres chastised governments for its lack of coordination to combat Covid-19. “We still do not have a coordinated action of all countries to suppress the virus under the guidance of the World Health Organization,” he said. “Guidelines from the World Health Organization were not respected in many countries of the world and there was a tendency for each one to go its own way. We absolutely need an articulated action in which all countries join the same efforts in order to commonly suppress the transmission.
If it is true that we have already witnessed the mobilization of 5 trillion U.S. dollars, it is far from what is needed, especially because most of what was mobilized was by the developed world to support their own economies. We are far from having a global package to help the developing world to create the conditions both to suppress the disease and to address the dramatic consequences in their populations. … Massive help is still required to the developing world. We are not yet there but I hope we will be moving in that direction...
More, https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/31/covid19-greatest-test-for-the-world-since-1945-says-un-chief/
- Also: UN launches COVID-19 plan that could ‘defeat the virus and build a better world’
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/03/1060702
