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© 2020 Observer Research Foundation and Global Policy Journal. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Observer Research Foundation 20 Rouse Avenue, Institutional Area New Delhi, India 110002 [email protected] www.orfonline.org ORF provides non-partisan, independent analyses on matters of security, strategy, economy, development, energy and global governance to diverse decision-makers including governments, business communities, academia and civil society. ORF’s mandate is to conduct in-depth research, provide inclusive platforms, and invest in tomorrow’s thought leaders today. Design and Layout: simijaisondesigns Graphs: Rahil Shaikh Language Editing: Preeti Lourdes John Citation: Maya Mirchandani, Shoba Suri and Laetitia Bruce Warjri, eds., The Viral World (New Delhi: ORF and Global Policy Journal, 2020). Cover Image Source: da kuk/Coronavirus outbreak on a world map/Getty/Royalty Free https://www.gettyimages.in/detail/photo/coronavirus-outbreak-on-a-world-map-royalty-free- image/1213355637?adppopup=true ISBN: 978-93-90159-27-7 THE VIRAL WORLD Edited by Maya Mirchandani Shoba Suri Laetitia Bruce Warjri Contents Editors’ Note ........................................................................................................................................................ 6 Pandemics Strike,Communities Respond ............................................................................................................. 9 1 What Ghana Can Learn from Sierra Leone About Crisis Leadership ................................................................. 10 2 Corona-Immunity as a Resource and Opportunity for Emerging Markets ........................................................ 16 3 Economic Vulnerabilities and Power Shifts in a Post-COVID-19 World............................................................. 21 4 Doctors as Storytellers .......................................................................................................................................... 26 5 Bend it Like Kerala: How an Indian State is Holding its Own Against COVID-19............................................. 32 6 Coexisting with COVID-19: Saving Lives and the Economy ............................................................................... 37 A Viral Paradigm Shift ......................................................................................................................................... 43 7 Key Measures to Address and Mitigate COVID-19 in OECD and BRICS Countries .......................................... 44 8 Germany in the COVID-19 Crisis: More Robust than Other European Countries? .......................................... 50 9 The Future of International Cooperation in Times of Existentialist Crises ....................................................... 56 10 Great Power Blame Game: The Ongoing War of Words Over COVID-19 ........................................................... 62 11 Smaller South Asia: Competition for Influence Amid COVID-19 Response ...................................................... 72 12 COVID-19: Reading the Tea Leaves in China ....................................................................................................... 78 13 How to Fight a Common Battle Against COVID-19 in a Leaderless World ........................................................ 82 Looking Back,Looking Forward ........................................................................................................................... 87 14 The World After COVID-19 ................................................................................................................................... 88 15 Technology in the Times of a Global Pandemic: Lessons from India .................................................................. 95 16 The Pandemic in the Gulf: What it Portends for NRIs in the Region.................................................................. 102 17 Cohabiting with the Contagion: Lessons from History ....................................................................................... 111 18 Women Leaders are Doing Better in the COVID-19 Crisis .................................................................................. 116 About the Editors ................................................................................................................................................. 123 About the Authors ................................................................................................................................................ 124 6 Editors’ Note his series of articles and essays paint a wide, anthropological canvas that delves into the impact of the novel coronavirus on geopolitics, world trade, public health Tand policy, and socio-economic interactions. In fact, it shines a light on human behaviour, and our lives and livelihoods in broad strokes. The pandemic has overshadowed every global crisis—whether terrorism or hot wars, energy security or climate change— and will have lasting impacts on the attainability of sustainable development. The impact is international and domestic, global and local, on communities as well as on the individual. Historically, health epidemics have marked significant shifts in political, social and economic behaviour, and COVID-19 is no different. It has not only challenged humanity and its habits at an existential level but promises (or threatens) to change everything that was once familiar. World over, nations suffered deeply as a result of the Influenza epidemic in 1918, right after the end of First World War. As our writers point out, there are apparent similarities with the interventions that took place then and the ones that are taking place now to tackle COVID-19—identifying cluster outbreaks; containing hotspots; and focusing on sanitation, contact tracing and quarantining. A century later, under the cruel weight of another deadly contagion, the healthcare systems and economies of even the most developed nations have crumbled, exposing significant gaps that are exacerbated, in several cases, by disparities in the social contract where the older, the weaker and the marginalised have fallen victim either to the disease or to the hardship it has unleashed. Italians, known for their consuming embraces in tight-knit family structures where generations divided by age interact closely every day, saw their elderly die in large numbers. Emerging from nearly two months of a complete lockdown, a grieving public is coming to terms with a new way of re-engagement—where human touch is absent and staying apart is considered the only way to stay together for the foreseeable future. Italy’s story of overwhelmed hospitals, doctors and nurses being forced to choose which patients had a better chance of survival—to decide how to optimise its ICU facilities—has been echoed across the Atlantic. In the US, New York City emerged as the global COVID-19 epicentre. Its doctors and nurses shattered any illusion that the world’s greatest superpower was ready to withstand the charge of the novel coronavirus. Protective gear was unavailable across the city’s inundated hospitals, the contagion was high, and it was clearly a mistake to assume—based on the casualties from Europe’s ageing populations—that it was only the old and the sick who were more at risk. Data from across New York hospitals also Editors’ Note 7 revealed that mortality figures indicated huge racial, ethnic and economic disparities. To ‘flatten the curve’—even though the city never went into the kind of lockdown that India saw—New York state governor Andrew Cuomo held daily briefings, issued guidelines for the public on what “shelter in place” meant, and displayed the kind of leadership in a crisis that was lacking in the White House. Given what we have seen emerge from the world’s mightiest nations, it is easy to make the case, even if mistakenly, that the Global South has fared somewhat better. While India has made great strides since Independence in the eradication of epidemics like small-pox and polio, improved administrative responses to frequent viral illnesses, and made a name for itself in the manufacture of generic drugs, COVID-19 has felled much of this complacent confidence. Those making the case that a complete lockdown and the imposition of a punitive colonial-era Disease and Epidemic Act has helped India control its COVID-19 positive caseload can only do so hypothetically. The gradual lifting of a draconian lockdown, which was intended to buy time to ramp up testing and enhance medical preparedness, has revealed that little has been achieved on both fronts. Worse still, it has exposed and deepened fault-lines of class in Indian society, leading to further marginalisation, powerfully driven home by daily images of the exodus of migrant labourers from Indian cities. This has ended up causing unwarranted stigmatisation, particularly of minorities and the poor, who might have contracted the novel coronavirus. In its fight against both—the pandemic and the economic hardship caused by sudden lockdowns in India—our writers argue that the Indian government is attempting to use existing financial inclusion programmes under Aadhaar and the Jan Dhan Yojana scheme to provide food and economic relief directly to those who need it the most. As images of despair,