A review by aizataffendi
Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria
4.0
A contemporary read on the lessons that the COVID-19 pandemic had taught us. One salient lesson which hits close to home is the need of an effective government to curb the ongoing pandemic as well as future ones. While Malaysia's COVID-19 disaster response was lauded as one of the best in the world during the first half of 2020, there was a bitter twist towards the end of the year as political infighting in one of its states led to a spike in cases after a state election was held without proper planning in place. The political crisis which continued to happen at state and federal levels afterwards, would drag Malaysia even further down in terms of its response to the disease - although the timely and swift rollout of the vaccines did help to improve the situation a little.
The lesson on inequality was also spot on, I feel. What was supposed to be the great equalizer, the pandemic had instead promoted a greater divide between the rich and the poor. Take the vaccines, for example. World leaders, especially that of developed countries seemed to be nonchalant to the fact that with pandemics like this, no one is truly safe until everyone is! The lack of distribution and rollout of the vaccines in Africa has now led to the creation of a new variant, the Omnicron - which has forced countries to shut its doors once again despite their efforts to return to normalcy. For this, Fareed aptly mentioned the saying "History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes".
The lesson on inequality was also spot on, I feel. What was supposed to be the great equalizer, the pandemic had instead promoted a greater divide between the rich and the poor. Take the vaccines, for example. World leaders, especially that of developed countries seemed to be nonchalant to the fact that with pandemics like this, no one is truly safe until everyone is! The lack of distribution and rollout of the vaccines in Africa has now led to the creation of a new variant, the Omnicron - which has forced countries to shut its doors once again despite their efforts to return to normalcy. For this, Fareed aptly mentioned the saying "History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes".