First, a little bit of good news amid all the despair and depression: In Italy, where the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 is the highest in the world, a 104-year-old woman has recovered after falling sick on March 17. Amazingly, Ada Zanusso also survived the 1918 Spanish flu. Even more amazingly, she lived in a nursing home where 20 other residents died of the virus.
Elsewhere, the outlook is getting grimmer by the day. Global economic losses from the pandemic are now forecast at anywhere between US$900 billion and $2 trillion depending on how the situation evolves, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad).
Measures imposed by countries to contain the disease, such as quarantines, border closures and suspension of productive activities, will severely disrupt their economies, with potentially significant spillovers across borders.
Clearly, what we have seen as the virus continues to spread across 200 countries is that the world's health system is underprepared. Beds at hospitals are not enough to serve skyrocketing infections. Doctors and others on the front line are working to exhaustion at overwhelmed hospitals, often without enough protection for their own health.
"We should've been more prepared, and I don't know why we're not," a first-year resident at a hospital in New York City, where more than 5,000 people have died of Covid-19, told the Nikkei Asian Review last week.
"Even now, the health system is not fully prepared for the virus," he said, adding that medical workers at his hospital get only one mask per day and one face shield for one week.
With enough protection in place, negative consequences can be minimised, whether on human health or economic wellbeing. That's why policymakers in Asia need to come up with bold investments and measures to support affected businesses and households and prevent economic contagion.
A new report by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap) recommends that developing countries in the region increase their spending on health emergency preparedness by $880 million a year through 2030 on to tackle Covid-19 and future scourges.
The funds will ensure health responders can properly monitor the spread of a pandemic and care for infected people. The UN agency also calls on countries to consider setting up a regional health emergency preparedness fund.
The fact is, protection costs a lot less than a cure, the World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out last year. A joint World Bank-WHO panel projected then that a new influenza-type outbreak on the scale of the 1918 pandemic could cost as much as $3 trillion, or 5% of global economic output.
The cost of preparing for such a threat would be a mere $3.4 billion each year. In other words, every $1 spent on preparation would yield at least $2 in economic savings -- and potentially a lot more if it curbs a pandemic.
A significant portion of the money would be allocated to strengthen health infrastructure in poor countries, where infectious diseases disproportionately affect the poor. All that is, of course, secondary to avoiding the grief of losing countless lives.
If the world had spent adequately on preparing for Covid-19, much of the pain we are experiencing now could have been avoided.
This should teach us a lesson worth heeding when tackling the other crisis that hasn't gone away: climate change. A World Bank report released in September 2019 suggested that spending $1.8 trillion in the coming decade on climate-friendly measures would generate $7.1 trillion in economic benefits.
In November, the Economist Intelligence Unit found that, if the world doesn't do more to cut emissions, the economic cost could be as much as $7.9 trillion a year by 2050.
While the Covid-19 pandemic will be over within a year or two, a single solution, vaccines in this case, could bring it to a halt sooner. We can't say the same about climate change, which is a different type of crisis.
Even if we start cutting emissions, climate change will cause devastation for decades to come and it cannot be solved with technology alone. So while the priority for many economies now seems to tame the virus, there isn't much room for excusing continued climate inaction.
"Preparedness is a choice," says Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked on a pandemic playbook for the US government under former president Barack Obama. "The decision not to prepare in the face of an obvious threat is no excuse when you find that threat is overwhelming later on."