Written by: Sophi Shrestha - 21126, Grade XII
Posted on: 06 October, 2020
This year 2020 has been one of the most memorable years in history, but more for negative events. The year started with Australia declaring the state of disaster in January owing to the Australian bushfire across the east coast of Australia killing more than 3 billion animals and destroying the natural habitat of more. In February, the world faced the destruction caused by swarms of deadly desert locusts. Amid all these natural disasters, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
The COVID-19, previously known as the novel coronavirus, started in Wuhan, China in December 2019, and in January 2020, the WHO declared global health emergency due to the rapid spreading of the virus worldwide. Later in February 2020, the novel coronavirus was renamed “COVID-19” by the WHO where “CO” refers to “Corona”, “VI” refers to “Virus”, and “D” refers to “Disease”. And the event was announced as a global pandemic in March 2020, as mentioned earlier. As of the first week of October 2020, the total number of COVID-19 cases around the world is 34.86 million, with 7.92 million active cases, 25.91 million recovered cases and 1.03 million deaths. Owing to the pandemic, the majority of the countries in the world started lockdown to minimize the spreading of the virus, which had a huge impact on the world economy ultimately affecting the employment of the people throughout the world resulting in a high rate of job cuts worldwide.
The main sector affected by the job cut was especially the private sector. Because of COVID-19 nearly half of the world's workforce is a huge risk of losing their livelihoods. Due to this economic crisis created by the pandemic world’s workforce of 3.3 billion and almost 1.6 billion informal economy workers are suffering massive damage to their capacity of earning for their livelihood. Without any alternative income sources, the workers and their families have no means to survive. Millions of businesses around the world are barely surviving. Many people are facing difficulties in this pandemic not only because of the virus but also from job cuts, no food, expenses, and shelter. Especially in developing countries, people are facing many problems.
Reference
https://www.bbc.com/news/coronavirus
