NEWS & EVENTS

The Dawn of a Post-COVID World: Prospects for the COVID Pandemic in Asia and the World

On March 30th, the Reischauer Center held a seminar titled “The Dawn of a Post-COVID World: Prospects for the COVID Pandemic in Asia and the World,” moderated by Director Kent Calder. Panelists included keynote speaker Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, an associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health; Mr. Hirokazu Saito, a senior advisor on Eurasian Affairs at the Mitsubishii Corporation; and Dr. William Brooks, a professor of Japan Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies | SAIS.

In her presentation, Dr. Nuzzo reflected on the public health lessons learned over the course of the past two years. Even countries that saw early success with non-pharmaceutical measures have been overwhelmed in recent months by highly transmissible variants that even public health officials could not have predicted. This fact is particularly true for Asia, from which the global community has learned a great deal about the basic epidemiology of COVID-19 and the efficacy of various countermeasures. Nuzzo emphasized that global pandemics such as those caused by COVID-19 are now our new normal. However, as her work with the 2021 Global Health Security Index revealed, the world has not yet made the long-term investments and policy changes to prepare for the next great pandemic.

The ongoing Ukraine-Russia War represents a haunting new humanitarian crisis that at the same time poses further threats to the global community’s ability to respond to a public health crisis, Mr. Saito pointed out in his talk. Saito emphasized that disruptions from the war and resultant sanctions have already impacted commodity markets.

Finally, in his concluding remarks, Dr. Brooks highlighted how Japan in particular has been affected by the Ukraine-Russia war. The historically energy-dependent country has been grappling with a depreciating yen and sanctions against Russia which limit its own access to energy supplies. This conflict in addition to the COVID-19 pandemic have thus caused Japan to reconsider its supply chain dependencies.