A World in Disorder, issued by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), an independent monitoring and accountability body which prepares for global health crises, (GPMB), notes that the coronavirus has killed close to a million people, impacting health systems, food supplies and economies. According to A World in Disorder, it would take 500 years to spend as much on preparedness to equal what COVID-19 is costing the world, which GPMB says will be in the trillions. Last year, the Board warned that the world was unprepared for a deadly pandemic and called for urgent action to break the cycle of panic and neglect that has characterized past responses to global health crises. The new report provides a harsh assessment of the global COVID-19 response, calling it “a collective failure to take pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response seriously and prioritize it accordingly”. The report finds that although COVID-19 has demonstrated the deep interconnectedness of the world through economics, trade, information and travel, one of the greatest challenges of the pandemic has been faltering multilateral cooperation.

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