Coronavirus Pandemic: Countries wasted time to respond

World Health Organization has chided some countries for wasting time in marshalling resources to combat the coronavirus pandemic that has now killed more than 21, 000 people worldwide as G20 leaders yesterday pledged support for developing countries to cope with the economic fallout.

"We have been saying to the world that the window of opportunity is narrowing and the time to act was actually more than a month ago, two months ago," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general said.

"But we still believe that there is opportunity. I think we squandered the first window of opportunity. This is a second opportunity which we should not squander and do everything to suppress and control this virus."

Meanwhile, leaders of the G20 most industrialised nations met by videophone yesterday as calls mounted for an action plan to tackle a crisis that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described as "threatening the whole of humanity."

After the emergency summit, G20 nations pledged a "united front" in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, and said they were injecting $5 trillion into the global economy to counter the impact of the crisis.

"We are injecting over $5 trillion into the global economy, as part of targeted fiscal policy, economic measures, and guarantee schemes to counteract the social, economic and financial impacts of the pandemic," the leaders said in a statement.

They also pledged to work swiftly with multilateral bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization and regional banks to deploy a "robust" financial package to support developing nations.

With the disease tearing around the globe and three billion people locked down, countries are desperate to find ways to stop its terrifying spread and deal with an economic shock that could surpass the Great Depression.

Cases continued their upward spiral Thursday, with Europe, now the hardest hit continent, clocking over 250,000 infections and nearly 15,000 deaths while fatalities in the US hit the four-figure mark.

With a third of the world's population under lockdown, air travel practically halted and borders shut, economists say the restrictions could cause the most devastating recession in recent history.

In a sign of the economic impact, some 3.3 million people in the US filed unemployment claims last week -- the highest number ever recorded -- the Labor Department reported yesterday. The US has close to 70,000 cases and 1,050 deaths, and numbers are rising daily.

The global lockdown -- which also hemmed in India's huge population this week -- tightened further yesterday as Russia announced it was grounding all international flights, while Moscow's mayor ordered the closure of cafes, shops and parks.

Tokyo's millions of citizens have been told to stay home too, just days after the city was forced to postpone the 2020 Olympic Games for a year.

Tourism-dependent Thailand has shuttered its borders while China, where the disease was first detected in December, said it was drastically cutting international flights as imported cases threatened to cause a resurgence.

European and leading Asian stock markets were back in the red amid fears of the economic impact yesterday despite US senators finally passing a gargantuan $2 trillion stimulus package.

Singapore offered a major warning for the world, suffering its biggest contraction since the financial crisis during the first quarter, while France's lockdown has slashed economic activity by a huge 35 percent, its statistics office said.

But in Europe, the World Health Organization offered a glimmer of hope, saying there were "encouraging signs" after Italy reported a lower rate of new infections.

Italy now has the highest death toll in the world with 7,503 fatalities and nearly 75,000 infections.

Though it has seen a slight drop in new cases in recent days, it is "still too early to say whether the pandemic is peaking" there, WHO Europe director Hans Kluge cautioned yesterday.

In Britain, the National Health Service said London's hospitals are facing a "continuous tsunami" of seriously ill COVID-19 patients, despite a lockdown imposed this week. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said the country could be just a few weeks behind Italy's curve.

And Spain, with the world's second highest death toll after Italy, continued to suffer with the number surging to 4,089 after 655 people died within 24 hours. It extended lockdown by 2 weeks.

The number of deaths around the world from the novel coronavirus stood at 21,873, according to a tally compiled by AFP at 1100 GMT yesterday from official sources. More than 481,300 declared cases have been registered in 182 countries and territories since the epidemic first emerged in China in December. Of these cases, at least 107,100 are now considered recovered.