U.S. COVID-19 cases exceed 600,000, economic reopening under heated discussion

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Tuesday the global economy is on track to contract “sharply” by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the “worst recession” since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

“This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, a major revision over a very short period,” IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said at a virtual press conference on the latest World Economic Outlook report released Tuesday.

The report showed that advanced economies will contract significantly by 6.1 percent in 2020, and emerging markets and developing economies, which typically have growth levels well above advanced economies, will shrink by 1.0 percent.

The U.S. economy is expected to contract by 5.9 percent this year, and the euro area will see a decline of 7.5 percent, said the report. Japan’s economic output will shrink by 5.2 percent, and Britain’s will fall by 6.5 percent.

“The report emphasizes the unprecedented scale of the crisis,” Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned professor of economics at Columbia University and a senior UN advisor, told Xinhua via email.

“The IMF predicts a kind of V-shaped recovery, down sharply in 2020, up not quite so sharply in 2021,” Sachs said. “But we might not get such a quick bounce-back because the virus will continue to disrupt public health and therefore the world economy for years to come.”

The IMF reiterated that it’s actively deploying 1-trillion-U.S.-dollar lending capacity to support vulnerable countries, including through rapid-disbursing emergency financing and debt service relief to the poorest member countries, calling on official bilateral creditors to do the same.

HALT FUNDING?

As COVID-19 continues to take a toll globally, the Trump administration is halting the nation’s funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), a move experts have warned against.

Read alsoTrump says halting U.S. funding to WHO

A review is being conducted to assess the WHO’s role in addressing the spread of the coronavirus, Trump said at Tuesday’s briefing.

The remarks came as Trump is aggressively defending his own handling of the outbreak in the country after his administration has been scrutinized for downplaying the threat from the coronavirus early on and faulted for delays in testing.

The tone also differed from one of his tweets on Feb. 24, several days before the United States reported its first death from COVID-19.

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump wrote at that time. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart.”

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, called cutting funding to the WHO during a global health crisis “disgraceful,” warning that it would cause death and even blow back on the United States.

“How shortsighted when global coop needed more now than ever,” Gostin said in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

In remarks delivered last week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “We must quarantine politicizing this virus at national and global levels.”
“We have to work together, and we have no time to waste,” he stressed.

Read alsoWhite House mulls guidelines on reopening economy as COVID-19 cases exceed 580,000

Source: Xinhua