As European nations battle to manage the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis has laid bare the continent’s political and financial geological fault.
On March 12, a planeload of masks, respirators, and other medical supplies from China arrived in Italy, a day before the World Health Organization stated that Europe had become the epicenter of the pandemic. Days later on, lots of doctors and nurses from Cuba took a trip to Lombardy, Italy’s hardest-hit region.
” Our government sent us here to bring our uniformity here,” stated Carlos Perez Diaz, the leader of the Cuban delegation.
There has actually been little evidence of such uniformity in between European nations. In early March, when Italy requested face masks and other medical materials through the European Union’s civil security mechanism, EU member states responded with silence
And in the face of an unprecedented recession, with businesses shuttered and countless people out of work, federal government officials have actually been mired in arguments over what form any financial relief needs to take, with rifts forming in between southern nations like Italy and Spain, and more fiscally conservative northern countries like Germany. After an all-night conference, European finance ministers emerged on Wednesday morning with the news that they had failed to reach a consensus
Such inaction is “a stressing signal from the European Union,” David Cormand, a French politician and member of the European Parliament, informed HuffPost France “It has to demonstrate its effectiveness. Nevertheless, one has the impression that it is too little, too late.”
” Undoubtedly, Europe has actually been sluggish to react,” said Tara Varma, director of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The impact of COVID-19 on Europe has been absolutely nothing short of devastating. In Italy, Spain, and France, there have actually been more than 370,000 verified coronavirus infections, and more than 40,000 individuals have actually died, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
Recently, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, officially said sorry to Italy for stopping working to respond more quickly.
” Today Europe is setting in motion alongside Italy,” even if “sadly it has actually not constantly held true,” von der Leyen wrote in the Italian paper la Repubblica. “We should acknowledge that in the early days of the crisis, faced with the requirement for a typical European reaction, a lot of thought only of the issues in their own nations. They did not realize that we ca