2024 APRIL ISSUE
COVID-19 CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC FINAL REPORT
Written by Andrew Sia
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From the Desk of the Publisher
From April 2020 until April 2024, we have created 45 reports to show to our readers the cases of the coronavirus pandemic. It was a very painstaking work for us as every Saturday we would sit in front of the computer and click into the website of Worldometers to record their latest cases. We would also report other related reports and findings relating to this pandemic. It was all for the purpose to alert our readers for the awareness of this virus killer.
On April 21, It was to our surprise, and also to our relief, to read from Worldometers that they stopped the reporting on April 13. It was also due to the reason that many countries have stopped their submission of the data. The numbers would not be accurate anymore as less countries would submit their findings. To us, this makes sense, in fact we shouldn’t neglect but ought to watch our news closely for any adverse situation.
We have started to compile our reports and a book would be published under the title of “Chronical of a Century Pandemic (Eve of Destruction of Mankind)” and we would let you know when it is available.
Worldometers’ Report of COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic made an announcement, “As of April 13, 2024, the Coronavirus Tracker is no longer been updated due to the unfeasible of providing statistically valid global totals, as the majority of countries have now stopped reporting. On January 29, 2020, Worldometers started tracking the coronavirus, delivering the most accurate and timely global statistics to users and institutions around the world at a time when this was extremely challenging. We thank everyone who participated in this extraordinary collaborative effort.”
Our journal started to report about the coronavirus in our April 2020 issue and we published the article titled “When China Catches the Coronavirus, There is No Escape of the World.” We were using data from Worldometers dated March 13, 2020, and covered countries, China, Italy, being the two most affected countries, along with Spain, South Korea, Germany, France and the United States. In that same issue, we published “Threats & Opportunities that Have Brought Along by the Coronavirus.”
In our July issue, we began to publish the monthly report of “Coronavirus Regional Report March to April,” as the catching one for April 2020’s report. From then on, we made the monthly report started with “Coronavirus Regional Report May 2020.”
This monthly report continued until our July 2023 issue, where we covered the April, May and June report. In our October 2023 issue, we started to do quarterly report and in that issue we published “Coronavirus Third Quarter Regional Report – September 2023.”
Our last report was in our April 2024 issue, where we published “Coronavirus First Quarter Regional Report -March 2024.” In that report we quoted, “We have decided to stop our reporting as from now, but on the side, we will still record those numbers of cases and deaths. We never know how the viruses can mutate and threaten our civilization again.”
We continued to mention, “After this issue, we will start to compile all the writeups we have published in our journal with the title as ‘Chronical of a Century Pandemic (Eve of Destruction of Mankind)’ and we will make it available to our readers. We hope that we can learn from the mistakes, whether it was a matter of timeliness, political decisions, and any other reasons.”
At the moment, I have the mixed feeling as I was correct when I decided to tone down the reporting since October 2023, and had it changed to quarterly. After April 2024, I went further to announce that we would stop our reporting totally. But the announcement from Worldometers of April 13, 2024, came to me a total surprise as it would stop their reporting totally.
I don’t want us to consider this pandemic is totally over, the only thing is perhaps that it is more under control. I want to keep the protocol to help ourselves free from catching the viruses. I still feel so sad for those who lost their lives as I believed that among ourselves there were those unfortunate ones who had lost their lives.
I attached a drawing I was using in several occasions showing how the virus escaped Wuhan, and how it reached the four corners of the globe.
God bless everyone.
The finish off of this writeup, I would like to cover my reading from the World Health Organization’s latest report for the going forward for this global pandemic.
It was in March of this year, officials from 194 countries came together trying to agree on a global plan to deal with a threat of an unknown disease they called “Disease X.” This is the code name used to refer to an unknown disease that may ravage the world one day, just like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Actually this meeting has been held in its ninth round for the world’s so called “first pandemic treaty” to bring before the World Health Organization’s decision-making annual assembly meeting in May. This accord is aiming to bring the governments, institutions, and the world population to come in terms to avoid the mistakes we made during our last pandemic.
As we could have expected that during those talks the low and middle-income countries are pressing the rich countries and those conglomerate pharmaceutical companies for supporting those life-saving health resources.
Already those conservatives in the U.S. have complained after the group’s meeting on March 28, that the Biden administration has been giving way to the WHO treaty by sacrificing the U.S. sovereignty. With today’s geopolitical tensions, almost any issue can be used to attack one another and this is such a pity.
World Health Organization (WHO) is a United Nations agency, with its headquarters in Geneva, was founded in 1948 by 194 states and its current Director-General is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who has been holding that position since July 1, 2017. Under his leadership, he had caused the serious failures of monitoring, responsiveness, and unable to lead the international co-operation that contributed to more than seven millions of deaths globally out of the total 700 million cases. WHO delayed the announcement of coronavirus as the global pandemic until March 11, 2020. Knowing that China discovered its first case of COVID-19 in Wuhan in December 19. China, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, declared the lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 outbreak only on January 23, 2020 and restricted its people’s movement in and out of the city. WHO was aware of this and didn’t take any action.
The financial losses due to COVID-19 are immerse and difficult to quantity precisely. It encompassed a wide range of factors—economic disruption, healthcare costs and societal impacts. It has also extended beyond just economic indicators, but also has profound impact on social, psychological, and health-related impacts that are difficult to quantify in monetary terms.
IMF estimated for the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global economy contracted by about 3.5% in 2020. Some estimates suggested that the global cost could be in the trillions of dollars, while the Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimated that the global economic cost of the pandemic could have ranged from $5.8 trillion to $8.8 trillion.
In the coming discussions, a joint article published in March 2021 by two dozen leaders of countries including the UK, France, South Africa and Indonesia, to foster an all-government approach to improve the global alarm systems, data sharing, researches, production and distribution of health related vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and personal protective equipment. This accord immediately received the criticism from the U.S. saying that the treaty would violate international sovereignty and infringed the intellectual property.
One source of the disagreement has been referred to the sharing information about the new pathogens. Knowing that this would help the pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines to overcome them. There is already a system known as the Pathogens Access and Benefit Sharing System (PABS), but the information is restricted and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, a global industry group, are not agreeable to the disclosure of the pathogens.
Instead, the pharma industry is reading to enter binding commitments for allocation of vaccines, antivirals and other drugs for WHO, Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). The plans for extending vaccine production facilities in the low and middle-income-countries have yielded modest results.
Coming back to the accord published in March 2021 by two dozen leaders of countries, it fall into the time when Trump started the formal process to pull the U.S. from the WHO in July 2020. This was resurrected by Biden the following year when he entered into the White House. The decision was reversed. This shows any good intention to come together collectively in the time of crisis, the geopolitical differences are the biggest interference.
One of the controversies about the mystery of how COVID-19 emerged in China in late 2019 has not been solved. Lately, the WHO write to China as asked for co-operation, both for the science and moral reasons, but there is still no answer.
Another big uncertainty we have is the coming up of the U.S. presidential election. We have noticed the wide gap of the two parties for their commitments in many things, and the attitude towards the pandemic is just one of those unfortunately.
What we have learned in the latest global pandemic is obviously not enough. All we can do is to have some good leaders who can straighten out our pathway in front of us and bring us together in front of these major issues.