In my previous post, I noted that there seemed to be no appreciable difference in fatality rates for US states that instituted lockdowns early or late, or among European countries whose social-distancing and lockdown measures …
The Strategist on: "Coronavirus"
In an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison on 19 April, more than 200 economists rejected commentators’ calls for a rapid return to work and labelled the notion of a ‘trade-off’ between public health …
When the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes was asked what he did when the facts changed, he replied: ‘I change my mind. What do you do?’ I’m not sure whether Prime Minister Scott Morrison …
The continued strength of the iron ore price is surprising, given the collapse of oil, which traders have recently been willing to pay buyers for if they’ll agree to offload full tankers. Oil and iron …
‘This is not a discrete one-off episode’, warned Jeremy Farrar, the head of Wellcome Trust, a global health research foundation. ‘[T]his is now an endemic human infection.’ Covid-19, as Farrar suggests, knows no boundaries, geographic, …
In the years leading up to the global Covid-19 crisis, Australia, like many countries, failed to heed health specialists’ warnings on the likelihood and consequences of a global pandemic. Critical pandemic readiness was an insurance …
As Winston Churchill once observed, too many people who ‘stumble over the truth’ will ‘pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened’. But in the case of Covid-19, the world has been …
Africa is no stranger to epidemics and public health crises. Ebola is estimated to have killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa in 2014–16, and more recently claimed over 2,000 lives in the eastern …
Having already claimed more than 227,000 lives and sent the global economy towards its deepest slump since the Great Depression, the Covid-19 crisis is bound to reshape geopolitics. While the contours of the post-pandemic order …
The rapid evolution of genomics over the past three decades, combined with the ‘dry runs’ of SARS, MERS and swine flu, created a genuine sense of optimism about the global capacity to respond to new …
The huge damage caused by Beijing’s initial mishandling of its public-health response to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s gross and mainly unsuccessful attempts to control the global narrative, have highlighted …
Around the globe, transnational serious and organised crime groups’ traditional business models are being disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of these groups are in uncharted waters. Gareth Rice’s recent Strategist post, ‘Narcos in the …