 The virus is accelerating. It's the whole world versus a virus. Numbers matter because they're not just numbers, they are people. And what numbers? We're heading towards half a million confirmed cases around the world and 21,000 deaths. A billion people are in lockdown around the world. You can't win a football game only by defending. You have to attack as well. Welcome to World Vs. Virus, a podcast from the World Economic Forum that aims to make sense of the COVID-19 outbreak. I'm Robin Pomeroy, this week. Sharon Burrow, head of the International Trade Union Confederation, gives what she says is a conservative estimate of the number of people around the world who will lose their jobs due to the outbreak. The ILO says we could lose up to 25 million jobs. I think depending on the time frame, the cost could be, frankly, higher than that. Vlogger Molly Burke tells us what it's like to live with the threat of COVID-19 if you're blind. I touch everything. My hands are my eyes. It's scary to think there are things that are unavoidable for me that other people wouldn't have to touch or do. At the start of the podcast, you heard the head of the World Health Organization talking about the numbers. I'll be talking to his most senior advisor, who tells me what we might expect next and also, strangely, why knowing the approximate length of a llama could save your life. Make it difficult for the virus to get between you and the other people. So, I turn now to Linda Lasina, who's at the World Economic Forum's New York office. Although you're at home, Linda, how are you? Hi, Robin. How are you? Not too bad. Thanks very much. Now, you've picked three of our best stories this week from the World Economic Forum agenda website that you and I both work on. That's how you chose your pick of the week. So, Robin, what I did was I picked three stories for three very important reasons. That's to bring people a little bit of comfort. Okay. So, the first one, it brings us hope. We hit a milestone this week with more than 100,000 people recovering from the virus. There's still some question marks with that. It's not clear how long it'll be contagious or if you'll catch it again. And there could be some decreased lung function, but experts are saying that can be treated with physiotherapy. But the most important thing is that this coupled with the global work on vaccines is that there is a reason to hope. That article is called What Happens After You Recover from Coronavirus? And it gives a definition of what recovery means. It says the CDC, that's the US Centers for Disease Control, defines recovery as an absence of fever with no use of fever reducing medication for a full three days. What's your second story then, Linda? The second one can help strengthen our resolve. There is a piece that we published this week by an epidemiologist and public health expert, and he reminds us that the impact to wealthy nations is a reminder to us that the 900 million of the world's most impoverished will have an even harder time fighting the virus. So the safeguards that we have like washing hands are even more difficult for developing countries. So the tactics that we have, the aggressive tactics that have been suggested such as testing and tracing are all the more essential to prevent the virus from taking hold. And if you needed another reason to strengthen your resolve and do whatever you can to stop the spread of the virus in your own locality, since that helps everybody else globally anyway, that's a fine reason to do it. This article is called Coronavirus Is Coming For The World's Poor? Here are six ways to help. It really does highlight the fact that there's almost a billion people living in less developed countries as defined by the United Nations, many of which have very, very limited healthcare. But it's interesting, I don't know what you thought, Linda, what it said about the measures being recommended are very similar to those recommended for even the richest countries with the best healthcare in the world. It's about finding it early, social distancing, washing your hands, all of those things with the additional challenge to the less developed countries, particularly of getting things like protective equipment for medical staff, which you've already seen in the developed world has been a massive problem. What's your third story? My third story speaks to the power of ingenuity in a crisis. So there's a global strain on health systems, which we're all aware of, and a shortage of ICU beds. And so this story that we published this week is about an Italian design company that created a solution. They teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create prefabricated ICUs built inside shipping containers. And these can be joined together to create mobile field hospitals that can simply bring additional hospital beds anywhere in the world by rail, truck, boat, etc. And so the reason I bring this up is that it's an ingenious solution and great crises always take ingenuity. That one's called Hospitals Made from Shipping Containers Could Help Tackle COVID-19. You can find all three of those stories on our website, reform.org. Linda, thanks very much. Our first interview this week is one of the world's foremost experts on communicable diseases. Dr. Aylwood, assistant director general of the World Health Organization. Before COVID-19, he spearheaded the who's work against Ebola in West Africa. And for many years, he was a key figure in the fight against polio. Now he's working around the clock on coronavirus. So I'm joined by Dr. Aylwood from the World Health Organization just across the lake from me. You've had a busy day. Every day is a busy day. Thanks. So the first question that everyone listening to this will want to know, how many of them will be in some form of lockdown? Do you have any idea how long it will last? Well, probably the best indicator of how long this might last comes from China because that's the only country that has truly, let's say, taken an rapidly escalating COVID outbreak and really turned the corner and brought it down. And if you look across China, across the 31 provinces, all of which were impacted at one point or another, the longest and most difficult, of course, and that start there was Wuhan, which remained locked down. It will be nearly 10 weeks by the time they lifted there. It will have been all of February, March and much of April. Now, there were many other provinces, however, that were able to manage this with a much shorter period for the shutdowns that ranged anywhere from, let's say, a month due to two months. So it really depends a little bit on the context, how well the control measures, let's say, bite or take the heat out of this outbreak. But it will be more than a couple of weeks anywhere, almost definitely. That doesn't sound too long. I guess the other risk we're all worried about is a second wave. People keep quoting the Spanish flu from a century ago. Yeah. So right now, there's really two scenarios you could think of. What we've done basically, what countries have done is, with all these slowdowns and shutdowns and workplaces and educational institutions and in society, concerts, et cetera, what they've done is they've really slowed down the rate of increase of the COVID outbreaks, but they actually haven't broken transmission chains. That really requires finding every single case, testing every suspect case, confirming them, isolating the suspect cases, quarantining the others. You really have to do those transmission chain level measures as well as the big shutdowns and slowdowns and lockdowns if you want this thing really to turn around. So when I say give an optimistic timeline, it's if you were doing all of that. Now, most countries are scrambling just to get the big measures in place just to treat the most severe patients. And that's what worries me a little bit in the West and it might take a little bit longer to take the heat out of this thing. But I'll always want to be careful because we're dealing with a biologic process that's happening in the context of, you know, changes in seasons and other factors that just make some of this, frankly, unpredictable. The key thing right now is doing as much as you can to save lives. It means trading people. Yes, but it also means trying to slow down that outbreak at the same time. That testing issue, there seems to be a little, there's different interpretations around the world of what should be happening. What is the World Health Organization's recommendation for testing? Is it test everyone you can? What is the recommendation? Well, that's a really good question, Robin, because there's a lot of interpretation even of our recommendations. So let's try and set that record straight. What you do in a situation like this always is test the suspect cases. You don't want to test everybody because number one, it will waste a lot of resources because a lot of people won't be impacted. The other thing was give a lot of people a false sense of security. They'll think, oh, the test was negative, so I'm safe. And you have to take any test like that in the context of the risk. So if you test a whole bunch of people who aren't sick, the test will tell you usually that they're not safe, but then you can even have false positives. You can have false negatives, all sorts of problems. So you really want to be for the reasons of issues around the test itself, but also issues around just the amount of resource available. And if we don't test in the way you're suggesting, that will increase the risk of a second wave. Well, what's going to happen, Robin, is that people will... People are getting advice that says if you feel unwell or you think you might have COVID, stay home until you feel better. Now, the reality is they may well have COVID. But if they stay home, first of all, and they're not sure they have COVID, they won't take the incredible precautions necessary not to infect the rest of their family if they live with people. But the bigger problem, Robin, is that within two or three or four or five days, they're going to feel a lot better. And they're going to say to themselves, gosh, I heard COVID was a terrible disease, so I must have just had a cold or something and I'll wander back out there into society and do supermarkets and other forms. And the problem, though, is they can still infect people because even though you feel better, you can still be infectious for up to 14 days and possibly even longer after you've recovered from the disease. So for that reason, we really want people to know their status because it just helps them just be better citizens and take better care of themselves and their families. I think we saw today Spain's death rates following Italy's overtook that of China's. Is there any way of saying why those two countries are getting it so heavily? Or is it just the way of these things and many other countries will be going down that route in a week's time or so? Well, there's a combination of factors, Robin. When we look at a country like Italy or Spain, we think, well, why did they get so badly hit? Part of it is just temporal. By that I mean timing. They got hit earlier than some of the others. And then some of the high death rates being et cetera can be associated with multiple factors. We hear about this in the news all the time. What is the older age of the population? Italy is the second oldest population in the world after Japan, of course. It can also be the fact that we're mainly seeing the severe cases that are hitting the hospitals and not all the mild cases are getting tested. So we have a falsely high death rate and there's other factors can be at play as well. So all of those people understand but what I always remind people is all of that is happening against a background of biologic processes in a large populations that we don't fully understand. We've known this disease for 12 weeks. Even diseases that we've known for decades, still we don't know everything about why they express themselves in different ways in different populations. But what we have learned is this virus has the propensity to cause severe disease, so societal disruption, massive outbreaks, economic disruption in any environment. We've seen it now in the Middle East. We've seen it in Asia. We've seen it in Europe. And what it tells us everywhere is be prepared, be ready, take every step you possibly can to try and prevent the explosive outbreaks we're seeing in places like Spain, like Italy. If you've got a few more seconds, I'd like to throw some rapid fire questions. If I get COVID-19, I'm tested, I've definitely got it. And I recover. Am I then immune from getting it again? Probably. We don't know 100%, but most of what we know about coronavirus is tells us that you will develop immunity against this one. We still haven't got the test to prove it. So it's going to take a little time, but the expectation is yes. How long does it linger on surfaces? We're buying things, bringing things into our houses. How much do we need to worry about the virus being on things? In most cases, it's going to be a very short period. Remember, viruses can only survive in human cells or living cells, pardon me, of an animal or human, whatever. As soon as it's out, the virus is dying. It's not replicating anymore. So the amount of virus is dropping very, very fast. So within a couple of hours, it's gone to low levels. However, and in your data to let, that's not a problem. However, if you have a case living with you or a contact, those people are spewing out a lot of virus on a regular basis. So that's a different setting altogether. Those, you know, if they're infected. And in that situation, you have to take extraordinary measures to make sure, you know, the living surfaces, et cetera, are all clean. That's a different matter, like in hospitals with sick patients. It can be carried in the air. Am I safe to go out, walk around on my respecting distances, go for a run or not? You're absolutely safe as long as you maintain the right distances. Because remember, this is a virus that is, it is a respiratory pathogen or a virus, but it moves in little droplets. And these droplets, they fall very quickly. They don't float in the air. So what happens is if I cough, these would travel about a meter, maybe a little bit further. And for that reason, we say it should be a meter, two meters between the people or three feet, six feet away. The length of a llama, someone told me yesterday. Of a llama? A llama, I was told yesterday. That's how far you need to be apart from the other person. Now, there are some situations where that'll happen in hospitals where the virus can get what they call aerosolized. And that's what people worry about, where it might be in little tiny particles that hang in the air longer. But that's an extraordinary situation. It's not what you have to worry about on a day-to-day basis. Here is, make it difficult for the virus to get between you and the other people. You know, that's how I explain it to people. It's just a virus. It's got to get from one person who had to make it hard to the virus. We can do this. Bruce Aylwood, Senior Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization. I hope we can get you again on the podcast soon to bring us up to date. Absolutely. Robin, thanks for having me. And you can hear an extended version of that interview on our website. COVID-19 is an unprecedented economic shock, as well as a health shock, and I want to find out what this means for workers. My colleague, Kerry Parker, spoke to someone who speaks for 200 million workers in 163 countries. Sharon Burrow, Head of the International Trade Union Confederation. The ILO says we could lose up to 25 million jobs. I think depending on the time frame, the cost could be, frankly, higher than that. But what we have to do is everything to minimise it. So, first of all, to the health crisis, the big glaring gap is only 50% of countries are providing free public health care. And I'm talking about the wealthy G20 countries. I'm a bit focused on them because they are, in fact, meeting as a leadership group on Thursday. But if that's the case in the richer world, then in the developing economies where the virus is only just starting to spread, then the health fallout could be disastrous. So, there has to be both an understanding that at this time, whether it's a mix of public and private testing and care, it has to be run on public health principles. It has to be available to everybody and to be a partnership across what is a divide, usually on a profit basis. And in the context of developing countries, then we need a solidarity that's extraordinary. Are there any countries that you feel are actually getting this right right now? Are there any examples of policies that have put in place that for you are hitting the mark? If you look at the two phases of the Nordic countries like Sweden and Denmark, there was an initial response and then a much more detailed response. Germany's reinvested in its 2008-2009 package and then increased support even beyond that. So, those countries look at those key elements of paid sick leave, of income guarantees for all workers and what the mix of that is. And the best of those packages, including the second phase of the UK package, have been negotiated with the Union. Outside of Europe, places like New Zealand, Singapore, Argentina and I would say surprisingly in Latin America, we've also seen some measures to include the informal sector and particularly those in the farming communities and that's a very good thing, but it's still only in two or three countries. In Africa, it's slow to move but then the virus has been slow to spread. But our message is very simple. You have to look at the guarantee and it's a health crisis. Different to 2008-2009, this has started with a human dimension and therefore in the real economy and is now spreading to the financial sector. In 2009, we saw the speculative economy simply spiral out of control and cause a crisis in the real economy. But remember then, nothing shut down. We took huge hits and yes, there was high unemployment, inequality escalated, the economy didn't shut down. To return to your point about the human consequences of this and the lack of sick pay that is so widespread, have you heard as an organisation stories of people who basically have no choice but to turn up to work sick and then presumably spread the pandemic even further? Oh, it's everywhere. I mean, you know, some of the symptoms are mild. Of course, it's very serious when you get to the life-threatening risk end of that curve. But if people work in informal sector, if they're day workers, if they're in factories that are still opening and there's no paid sick leave, no income guarantee, then, or job guarantee, then you have no choice. You have to feed your family. So you're going to go to work and that is simply a recipe for extending the reach of the virus beyond the kind of containment period that we're all working towards right now. And what would your message be to G20 leaders in that context? Very simple. The emergency plan is to share our wealth, to make sure there is paid sick leave, to re-establish a social contract with a floor that is paid sick leave, income guarantees and that means, of course, wages but it also means for those who are in self employment, freelancers, the platform business workers and the informal sector. This is a time for social protection generally and for investment in vital public services beginning with health. Molly Burke is a social media influencer who has almost 2 million followers on her YouTube page where she describes herself as a typical sushi and makeup loving millennial girl who just so happens to be blind. Anna Bruce Lockhart started by asking her how she was coping. You know, I think in certain ways I'm more prepared because blindness is such an isolating disability to live with already you can be in a room of 100 people and be isolated because you can't look around and make eye contact you can't walk up to somebody in a conversation you kind of have to wait for somebody to approach you and if they don't, they don't and you're alone and so I in ways my whole life prepared for social isolation you know all through middle school and high school I was incredibly isolated being very badly bullied at school spending much of my time alone with my mom and my dad forced me to develop a very strong relationship with my family and also just with myself learning to be okay with being alone and with myself which I think for many people is uncomfortable and something we avoid doing so I think in certain ways I'm more prepared to be isolated and maintain my mental health which is something as somebody who's struggled with mental illness I've been concerned about for not only myself but for my followers and for the world so in certain ways I'm more prepared and in other ways I'm definitely going to be more at risk so you know I have my ups and downs where I'm like oh my god I'm stressed, I'm panicked, this is terrifying and then I have moments where I'm at peace with it and I'm like this is the world I am certainly in a more privileged place than many I need to count my blessings and make the best of it What about the physical side of things so for instance the containment measures that have been shared where we can't go outside we can't touch things That's been honestly the biggest challenge is I touch everything, I do my hands are my eyes and so I'm always trying to cover my hand with my sleeve when I'm touching a railing or a door handle and the moment I get back home I'm washing my hands again but it's scary to think there are things that are unavoidable that other people wouldn't have to touch or do at the end of the day I have a guide dog I have to get my dog out you know I'm lucky that my dog is particularly sleepy and lazy at the best of times so he's kind of enjoying this in a way but at the end of the day I do still need to get him out at least three times a day for decent walks so there are certain parts of my life that are unavoidable but what I can't avoid I am in my situation I live with my mom who unfortunately is also in a higher risk community being 60 but she's going out she's doing the grocery shopping she's picking up supplies whatever she can go out and do instead of me she is because you know she's going to be less likely to have to touch everything in her vicinity and whatnot so that's where we're at right now each day by day, hour by hour so that's how we're taking it support systems for disabled people are incredibly fragile at the best of times and a lot of people have to rely on their friends their family, their siblings for support you have your mom but what happens when self-isolation measures dry up for many people as care facilities close down and care workers are replaced by emergency services that to me and my family and friends has been the most concerning right now I have my mom but what happens if my mom gets sick we live in a decent size two bedroom apartment but an apartment is only so big so what if she gets sick I probably can't stay here with her who's going to help her in that time and who's going to help me so that's definitely been a conversation my family is having and it's contributing to my mom and I being even more committed than we probably would have as extroverts social isolation and distancing but also I worry about my fellow disabled community who don't have family and friends to rely on and do rely on caretakers in the medical field in the professional field I've had fans reaching out sharing their experiences of their caretakers being removed from their homes no longer being given access to those people if they don't have friends or family what are they to do I don't know the answer to that and it's very scary to those people listening who may have friends or relations who are disabled how can we ensure we keep them safe in these completely unprecedented times as well as thinking of how to protect yourself and your own safety you need to think of those in your life that might be at higher risk and it's not just the elderly and it's not just those who are disabled as well and chronic illness and disability can live together but they also can be separate and for me I'm disabled, I don't have a chronic illness but I am still more at risk because of my lack of ability to do things for myself like grocery shop as well as my need to touch things around me so thinking of those people in your life and reaching out and asking simply what can I do to help you that's all from World Versus Virus this week you can find all our coverage of COVID-19 at weforum.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok and YouTube and on Twitter using the handle at W-E-F let's end on an up note when COVID-19 forced the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra to cancel its concerts the virus failed to stop them getting their music as live to the public this remarkable video on YouTube shows each musician playing the parts of a musical score and somehow by the magic of internet they appear all to be playing together I caught up with Mike Shepperclouse the man behind this beautiful defiant response to the global crisis when it became clear that the orchestra couldn't go on tour to the US and a lot of concerts that it began to I think like every other orchestra in the world we were looking for ways to keep communicating to our fans and to people in general I think there's only one piece in classical repertoire that stands for unity and for getting together and overcoming together you know and yeah this is such a strong piece when it comes to that Right well we're going to play some of it now to finish this week's podcast here it is the Rotterdam Philharmonic with Beethoven's Ode to Joy