COVID-19 - status quo change

This pandemic is now two months old and we are still not out of the woods. It will take some time for the world to rid itself of this scourge.  The problem is our patience does not count for anything. The virus has its own timetable and it will go away when it is good and ready.  The world had no inkling as to the scale or speed with which virus spread across the world.  It was no doubt helped initially due to the lack of transparency shown by the Chinese government by pressurizing WHO to water down its report on the lethality of the virus.  The world did not take the initial guidelines seriously and the results are there for all to see.  An unprecedented lock down across the globe and all economic and trade activity coming to a halt has resulted in the world stopping in its tracks.  While there is no denying the favorable environmental impact due to the stopping of world trade and transport, it has caused a lot of hardship and its effects will be felt for a long time to come.

Of late there has been a realization that this could have been avoided. If China had been more forthcoming on sharing data on the corona virus disease. But due the penchant of a dictatorial regime for showing that the government can do no wrong, the communist party published false data on the disease, letting it spread in the whole world. In hindsight the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be regretting its initial secrecy that it advocated regarding the disease because the world is now coming to realize the extent of the damage done and the real price it will have to pay. Whether the virus was spread by accident or design, the Chinese government now knows that it has done something wrong as there is a perceptible backlash against it the world over. It revised the Wuhan death figure by fifty percent almost twenty days after freezing it. This shows that controlling the narrative on the pandemic is more important to the CCP than saving lives.

 The world opinion now has a distinct tone which suggests that it does not approve of Chinese actions since the start of the pandemic. There is a marked shift in the foreign investment policies of major economies. Any strategic investment by China will now be scrutinized by the host government before being approved. Against the backdrop of the Huawei controversy, this had to come sometime and the COVID-19 pandemic has provided the trigger. Another realization is that the world has put all its eggs in one basket. Low manufacturing cost and favorable supply chain logistics made China the workshop of the world. But the pandemic dried up a lot of supplies of essential goods due to the lock downs imposed in the Wuhan area. China now has a monopoly on most medical supplies. But there is talk of diversifying the supply chain through more countries to avoid bottlenecks in emergencies.

Unconfirmed reports of a second outbreak in China are now being published, also, there are other conspiracy theories which suggest that the corona virus leaked from a Wuhan chemical lab experimenting in biological weapons. How this pans out in the near future remains to be seen, but it is now obvious that the world is seeing China in a new light.