It is still difficult to assess the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, but economists have little doubt that it will cost the world more than the epidemic of atypical pneumonia of 2002-2003. This, in turn, means it will become the most expensive epidemic of the 21st century. The amount of changes the pandemic brought, and the speed with which it occurred was literally a shock and a complete surprise for the world community. According to Antràs et al. (2020), “even without lockdowns, multiple waves of infection can occur in the open economy, when there would only be a single wave in each country in the closed economy” (3). The global scale of the spread of the coronavirus and its consequences have sharply turned public interest and attention towards global issues.
Globalization, in itself, creates, initiates and exacerbates various problems of the planetary – global – scale. They are called this because they correspond to well-defined criteria of globalism and relate to various spheres of public life of the world. This allows the researchers to classify such problems into groups, one of which includes the problem of health care. Thus, the coronavirus, being alone of the many diseases that humanity suffers from, has become an integral part of a common global health care problem. It happened when this disease, very quickly overcoming the threshold of an epidemic, acquired a global scale and turned into a pandemic.
In fact, this pandemic became the first case in the history of mankind, when the problem of health care has overcome not only local, but also regional boundaries and reached the global level. Does this mean that all previous pandemics were not global? Yes, that is true, although it might be hard to believe at first. Before the era of fundamental globalization, which originates at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, health problems in general, and all kinds of pandemics, in particular, did not go beyond regional scale. Restraining factors for the spread of any disease until the end of the 19th century were the relatively insignificant global contacts and a low speed of movement of large people masses over long distances. In other words, moderate migration population, as well as spatially limited military campaigns and battles were an important reason behind the localization of epidemics and pandemics within certain local or regional territories.
However, the situation changed fundamentally with the onset of fundamental globalization, when the basic spheres of public life economics and politics began to became fully a global phenomenon. Economic ties, political contacts and relations by this time finally acquired world outlines and an ever-increasing mobility. Antràs et al.’s (2020) research shows that “a decline in any international trade or mobility friction increases the rates at which agents from different countries meet one another” (2). Scientific and technological progress, which gave people trains, and then cars and airplanes, incredibly expanded the possibilities of movement and direct communication of large masses of people on a global scale and in real time. For example, World War I and the associated active movement of people, as well as military clashes of numerous armies, contributed to the rapid spread of the Spanish flu. Thus, it can be concluded that, since the development of globalization, the disease rates have never lost their growth. Before the globalization, they certainly were a territorially limited problem, but with the world changing, they became an acutely standing category of modern global problems.
Works Cited
Antrà s, Pol, et al. “Globalization and Pandemics.” MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020, doi:10.3386/w27840.