The Need for Concerted World Action !

 The death toll from this coronavirus pandemic has just ticked over two million on a world wide basis and the victims have been predominantly elderly people.  Put simply, COVID-19 is an influenza type disease that primarily attacks the lungs, and older people are less able to withstand the further deterioration it causes.

What is alarming is that this pandemic has gained the ability to develop new patterns and we are encountering new strains emerging in different countries.  Fortunately, this affects the rate of infection rather than the severity of the disease and there is hope that these new strains will be covered by the range of vaccines that we have been able to develop and put into practice.

A United Nations scientific team has at last been granted entry to China to try and determine how - when and where this new disease made the breakover from animals to humans.  The Chinese government is sensitive to any form of blame for the outbreak and claim that the disease originated in Europe and moved to China in frozen food imports.  How wide the team will be granted access to follow where research leads is yet to be determined.

This is an entirely new disease that had forerunners that gave early warning.  It has taken this world's science nearly a full year to develop several vaccines that promise a degree of protection and the danger is that the disease is still capable of developing new characteristics.   The death of two million people in a world population of about seven billion is not significant, but should the disease gain the ability to increase mortality across all age groups it would pose a threat to civilization as we know it..

Back in the Middle Ages what was termed the " Black Death " decimated nearly half the population of the countries it scourged, and in our inconnected world it would be impossible to halt its spread.  This is probably the greatest danger facing our world other than the disaster of world countries going to war against one another with nuclear weapons.

What is insane is the diversity of preventable action undertaken across the world.  Countries that were slow to act or timid in imposing controls have the disease out stripping their medical facilities and impacting on their economies.  The bodies of the dead are stacking up in temporary morgues and mass graves are again becoming a reality.

Science has long predicted that the end of the world will be caused by a pandemic, and we have one brewing mischief evolving on our very doorstep.  This one is not killing enormous numbers of people, but it is destroying jobs and trashing economies that may later lower the standard of living and result in a growing mass of "peasants " who are excluded from the progress of the past.

What is missing is world leadership.   There was the expectation that in such a crisis the United Nations would take control and coordinate world resources for the common good, but the world body has degenerated into political groupings that is little better than a " talk shop ".