No illusion. Covid19 is closer to us than we imagine. And getting closer day by day. Globally, in big cities and small centres alike, people are sliding into a sort of dystopian fiction as if empty streets, latex gloves, face masks and self-isolation were the new normal. Last Sunday, India with its population of over 1.3 billion citizens, had a first try at a total shutdown from 7am to 9pm, in a country where 1.8 million are homeless and 73 million don’t have a decent home.
The media of the entire planet is gripped by coronavirus. Never before has a virus stopped the entire world’s gears. Deep concern has spread throughout, and finally we start to see governments engineering some mass planning for worst-case scenarios. As it should be, the repercussions move from the global health sphere into business and politics.
The Coronavirus shockwave will end, at some point. Meanwhile, it is forcing a Copernican re-thinking of the interconnected global economy we have had in place for over three decades. Covid19 is not the first wake-up call to the world of the twenty-first century. The first seismic shock came with the terrorist attack of 9/11, followed by the global financial crisis which boiled over in 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Yet again, this invisible and silent virus – a minuscule RNA packet enveloped in a protein capsule – has shaped up to be an enormous stress test for globalization, shaking up all our certainties and individual lives.
