Cornelius Christian, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Brock University, had a piece recently published in the Niagara Independent about how the coronavirus outbreak reveals the weakness of our current economic order which relies on international trade and finance.
writes:
“Last month, the number of those infected with novel coronavirus, Covid-19, was around 1,000. That number is now over 80,000, with over 2,700 dead — much worse than SARS. And these are only the confirmed cases; Professor Neil Ferguson, an infectious diseases expert at Imperial College, London, suggests that there are hundreds of thousands of undetected cases. Both Ferguson and Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, another virus researcher, claim that Covid-19 will infect 40 to 60 percent of the world’s population if left uncontrolled.
In response to this threat, the Canadian government continues to sit on its hands, and refuses to consider travel bans or meaningful quarantine measures. This is nothing new.
However, I will not dwell on the virus’s public health implications here; instead, I submit that Covid-19 reveals the weakness of our current economic order, which relies on dense chains of international trade and finance. A single shock, such as a pandemic, can ripple through the chain, and destroy it.”
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