The Impacts of Pandemics in a Globalised World

Stella is visiting Halifax, Canada. She’s been stuck there an extra two weeks because flights are cancelled. She’s bored and surfs the internet. Suddenly she sees those shoes she wanted, and now she buys them! But… she gets a message...

Unfortunately, due to the outbreak of Covid 19, your order is delayed. What? I ordered those shoes online because the store’s closed. And now I have to wait? What’s the hold up?!

Yes, Stella ordered her shoes online, but that doesn’t mean she’s got around the global pandemic... Today, people, countries and companies interact more than ever before. We call this globalisation. In our globalised world, a pair of shoes might start and end in completely different countries, with plenty of stops in between. The leather used to make Stella’s shoes comes from a cattle ranch in Brazil.

The ranch supplies leather to a shoe factory in Vietnam. From Vietnam, the shoes are shipped to a port in the Canadian province of British Columbia, then trucked across four provinces to a distribution centre in Ontario. When someone places an order online from Halifax, Nova Scotia, the shoes usually make their final journey to the happy customer. One single pair of shoes has connected three countries and five cities. Every day, millions of trade transactions connect countries all around the world making them dependent on each other for materials, labour, transportation and customers.

But it’s not only shoes and other goods that cross borders in our globalised world. People, too, travel internationally more than ever before to visit, work, or study. We have new opportunities to see the world! but this also means travellers infected with a disease can rapidly carry it around the world. Once a disease arrives in a country, it can spread quickly throughout the population.

Many people might become sick or die. To slow the spread of the disease, governments may close borders so people can’t continue to travel, ask people who can work from home to do so, and even require some businesses to close. This is sometimes called a lockdown. With workers at home, manufacturing and sometimes even farming, slow down or even halt. It may be difficult for countries to get the goods they need --like food and medicine --especially if they import these from other countries.

And if people are staying home, there are fewer customers to buy products or to use services like restaurants and hotels. Some businesses run out of money and don’t survive the lockdown period. They shut down for good. Many people lose their jobs. When one business closes, other businesses down the chain are affected, too.

If the Canadian store selling Stella’s shoes shuts down, there is less work for transport companies as well as the factory in Vietnam. And if the factory produces fewer shoes, they don’t buy as much leather from the ranch in Brazil. The same global ties that made these countries dependent on each other for economic strength have made them vulnerable to shared economic problems. Globalisation has brought many benefits. It has given countries greater wealth, provided more opportunities for people to travel, and given shoppers an ever-growing choice of goods available quickly and cheaply.

But pandemics like Covid 19 have many people wondering if countries should become a little less reliant on others, more self-sufficient, so that economic problems don’t spread as uncontrollably, and so important things like food and medicine are always available.