The whole world faced the New Year of 2020 with high hopes that everything would turn out to be a lot better. To be fair, 2019 was not totally a bad year in general, especially when it comes to global affairs. There could be some ups and downs, but there wasn’t anything to disrupt the way of living of millions of people. Enter the first few months of this year, and almost every nation of the world experienced a historic event: a pandemic that threatens to claim millions of lives.

Back in November 2019, the first cases of infection from a novel strain of coronavirus were reported in Wuhan City, located in the Chinese province of Hubei. Information was a little bit scarce back then regarding this novel coronavirus of 2019, which was later on called formally as the SARS-CoV-2, a relative of the SARS virus that had plagued the globe in 2002. The World Health Organization (WHO) was quick to respond to this budding health crisis, and it even gave early warnings that this virus could get us all by surprise. Then in March, the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) already became a pandemic, and shut down thousands of cities around the world in hopes to curb the spread of the deadly virus.

With warnings being up as early as January, what could have gone wrong? Did governments around the world do something that may have aggravated this situation? Or are there things that they should have done but ended up not doing anyways that led us to this historic health crisis?

Preventive Measures Could Have Been Applied As Early As Last Year To Save More Lives

It was already clear back in January that the novel coronavirus that was born in Wuhan had been spreading like wildfire. The potential for it to spread outside of China was very evident. Yet, in February, there were very little heads up given in ports around the world to check if the virus could be flying into different countries aside from China.

United States of America and Europe had been kind of complacent in dealing with this disease, and this case was very clear when it still permitted flights coming from China when WHO had already issued a public health emergency with the novel coronavirus. And now we see these nations suffering the most from this pandemic, with thousands of people succumbing to the virus. There is no mythical mumbo-jumbo needed here to be saved from the pandemic. All it takes is strong leadership and concern for the general population.

There is always hope that the current situation will get better from here. Although, we should not wait or count until 0345 to make necessary actions to flatten the curve. Better yet, a proper cure to combat the virus itself might be done before this year ends.