World leaders need to coordinate to address economic and public health challenges that the coronavirus pandemic is causing on a scale unseen since the Second World War, according to the top United Nations official.
“The combination of the two facts and the risk that it contributes to enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, and enhanced conflict are things that make us believe that this is the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters.
That warning comes as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases is surging around the world, including the United States, where U.S. officials are bracing for as many as 200,000 deaths from the disease. The pandemic has driven Western leaders to urge their populations to remain at home while governments ramp up their ability to counter the new coronavirus, paralyzing global commerce in a way rarely seen outside of wartime.
“The size of the coronavirus shock to fiscal policy will be comparable only to the Second World War and the global financial crisis,” Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director at the Economist Intelligence Unit, warned Tuesday. “Many of the European countries that are among the worst affected by the epidemic, such as Italy and Spain, already had weak fiscal positions before the coronavirus outbreak … A debt crisis in any of these countries would quickly spread to other developed countries and emerging markets, sending the global economy into another, possibly much deeper, economic crisis.”
Guterres, who launched an international trust fund on Tuesday for wealthy countries to aid the poorer, worries that impoverished nations will struggle to stop the virus or manage the economic devastation it causes. “It is essential that developed countries immediately assist those less developed to bolster their health systems and their response capacity to stop transmission,” he said Tuesday. “Otherwise, we face the nightmare of the disease spreading like wildfire in the global South with millions of deaths and the prospect of the disease reemerging where it was previously suppressed.”
