By Nicole Ramos Palma – Student of the School of General Studies
COVID-19 has been the biggest issue in the world speaking about all the possible topics: economy, human relationships, commerce, and most importantly, public health. Initially, occidental countries thought that this illness was only affecting the oriental side of our world, but now we can all see how this issue is affecting all of us. Now that all the regions are going through the pandemic, globalized health threats due to COVID present the opportunity for countries to cooperate with each other in order to protect global health.
At the beginning of the pandemic in the 2020, the United Nations celebrated their 75 years by starting a new initiative where more than 186 countries thought it was necessary to team up in order to work with new technological challenges, environmental degradation, climate change and disasters, as well as health risks (García, 2020). Having big countries working together, for example, on finding a vaccine for the COVID-19, makes the process way simpler, and also make investigations even more expanded and deep. Nowadays, the World Health Organization has launched “ACT Accelerator” a program to accelerate global development, production and equative access to diagnose, treatments and vaccines for COVID. Governments of Europe, Latin-American, Africa and Asia, and some drug producers confirmed their participation on this global cooperation, where even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have signed in as first contributor for the WHO (Castro, 2020).
On the other hand, we have also seen how the society has polarized due to intolerance and hate speech against China society and politics (García, 2020). China has stayed open to collaborate in scientific investigation in order to find the Coronavirus origin. In spite of China, the foreign minister, Wang Yi, has declared attacks from certain politician from the United States who blames China for the spread of the Coronavirus. Wang urged the United States to cooperate rather than seek confrontation (Sputnik, 2020). So, is Coronavirus helping to divide the countries and avoid cooperation on global issues? Or are just specific some nations the ones trying to find the guilty instead of finding solutions to global health problems?
As we have seen through all the evidence in this article, there are great initiatives from big organizations that encourage the global cooperation between countries. Nations have identified the urgency of finding solutions to the present pandemic situations related to spread, symptoms, lack of medical supplies, vaccines and medical staff needed to attend the coronavirus implications, that cannot be solve without cooperation with some technologies and knowledge from other countries. Fortunately, we can see that there are more regions that are open to collaborate for public health than countries closing those collaboration spaces.
