Covid-19 and the World
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2021
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
No crisis has had the global reach and impact of Covid-19. There have been more than 120 million recorded cases of the Coronavirus and 2.7 million people have died and curbs on people’s freedoms have become a familiar part of daily life in many parts of the world.
Just over a year since the world started to get to grips with the first global pandemic in more than a century, what can we say about how different countries have dealt it?
Which countries have been worst-affected and why? Which public health systems have held up best? Why did test and trace work in some countries but not in others?
Around the world governments have propped up their economies accruing eye-watering amounts of debt, but was it money well spent?
Where and why has the vaccine roll out been most successful? And what could be the lasting legacy of the pandemic?
Contributors:
Dr.Thomas Hale, Oxford University
Prof. Martin McKee, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Nazmeera Moola, Ninety One, a South African asset management company
Dr Monica DeBolle, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Jerome Kim, Director General of the International Vaccine Initiative
Rasmus Bech Hansen, founder and CEO of Airfinity
Dr. Jennifer Cole, Royal Holloway, University of London
Kishore Mahbubani, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore
Producers: Tim Mansel, Paul Moss, Kirsteen Knight Sound Engineer: James Beard Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.9 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. We're in a room where the top experts, |
| 0:12.2 | and in today's luxury edition of 56 minutes, come together to understand one of the big issues of the day. |
| 0:18.7 | Britain, we know about, but how has the rest of the world been coping with |
| 0:22.6 | the pandemic? Who has suffered most and why? Who's got vaccines and who hasn't? And have countries |
| 0:28.8 | learned how to cooperate better? Worldwide, it's been grim. |
| 0:40.3 | More than 2.5 million people have died from COVID-19 over the last year. |
| 0:45.3 | Tens of millions of others have been infected. |
| 0:48.3 | As a species, we've been locked down, shut out and thrown out of work. |
| 0:53.3 | Inevitably, we know most about what's closest to home. |
| 0:57.3 | But today I want to understand better what has happened across the globe and why. |
| 1:02.1 | Who has fared worse and best and why? |
| 1:04.9 | Who's got vaccines and who hasn't? |
| 1:07.2 | And how well has the world come together to fight the common threat? |
| 1:13.2 | Step into the briefing room and we'll find out. |
| 1:20.9 | First, I want to look at how the governments of different countries responded as an outbreak in Wuhan became a virus on the move. |
| 1:25.2 | We'll start this in two very different countries. Let's begin with |
| 1:29.3 | Laura Bicker, our correspondent in South Korea. |
| 1:33.7 | In January last year, when I saw people wearing face masks on the street and huge testing |
| 1:39.5 | tents outside major hospitals, I thought the South Koreans were overreacting. At that point, the country |
| 1:45.3 | only had a few cases. All of them had come from China. We foreigners in Seoul wondered what |
| 1:51.7 | the Koreans knew that the rest of the world did not. It turned out they knew quite a lot. |
... |
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