The Great Pandemic of the 21st Century: The Stolen Lives

Abstract

One microscopic coronavirus has done what US sanctions, tariffs, embargoes, trade war, and the use of dollar as a weapon of economic destruction have failed to accomplish. The COVID-19 pandemic shock has caused unconceivable damage; 200,000 stolen lives in the U.S. (and close to 1 million in the world) and trillions of dollars globally. The farfetched impacts of coronavirus pandemic, the costliest in history (i.e. Great Lockdown), put many economies including the world’s biggest economy on a ventilator. Important signs provided by the coronavirus health crisis must not be ignored as previous signs were in the past. Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved if the White House (US President Donald Trump in particular) did not choose to downplay significant impacts of COVID-19; moreover, despite clear warnings by senior officials in late January 2020, not only Mr. Trump delayed taking aggressive actions to curb the spread of the virus to the United States (i.e. closing schools, locking down cities/states, imposing a travel ban, enforcing face masks, and social distancing), but he focused instead on protecting his re-election campaign; he also took the easy way out and blamed Beijing for misleading governments and not sharing the genome sequence of the coronavirus.