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Opinion | How China can reshape global aid and boost poor countries’ fight against the coronavirus
- By increasing its aid to Afghanistan and other developing countries, China could inspire a global effort to reorganise how support gets distributed
- A China-led renaissance in development aid would greatly enhance Beijing’s soft power and help manage Covid-19’s global impact
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The highly differential impact of Covid-19 vaccination is clearly visible in global statistics. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Asia has accounted for around a third of the world’s total caseload.
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This relatively good result is mainly a function of contrasting age distribution – less-developed nations tend to have fewer old people and more young people in their populations. Given the proclivities of all varieties of the virus, this has given Asia some protection.
There is a worrisome trend emerging among Asia’s poorer nations, though, as Asia makes up about two-thirds of the world’s new Covid-19 cases. Mortality figures are also concerning. Since the start of the pandemic, Asia has tended to make up a low proportion of global Covid-19 deaths but, of late, it has made up more than 75 per cent of daily new confirmed deaths. Even if official statistics can be questioned, they are the best we have.
The rise in Covid-19 cases is even more marked in Afghanistan. Before the collapse of Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s government, the country went from about 67,000 total cases on May 25 to more than 152,000 cases on August 18. During that same time, total deaths rose from about 2,800 to more than 7,000.
These are huge increases; in less than four months, the rise in cases and mortality exceeded the totals for the whole period from February 2020 to May 2021. This suggests that conditions were deteriorating quickly before the US withdrawal and have almost certainly got worse in the past few days. The victory of the Taliban signals a tragic future.
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Afghans flee to neighbouring Pakistan en masse following Taliban takeover
Afghans flee to neighbouring Pakistan en masse following Taliban takeover
There has also been a clear failure in US and global efforts to improve health care in Afghanistan, a fact best measured by vaccination. While about 32 per cent of the global population has received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine and 24 per cent is fully vaccinated, low-income countries are lagging far behind. Less than 2 per cent of Afghanistan’s population has received at least one vaccine dose, with only 0.5 per cent being fully vaccinated.
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