More than 180 countries and territories have confirmed a case of coronavirus, and the number of cases worldwide has reached more than 870,000. Like a massive storm front, the crisis threatens not only to overwhelm health-care systems but also to collide in unpredictable ways with childcare, education, employment, and transportation.

The question for national leaders is whether their countries can weather this unprecedented crisis as it crosses borders. Addressing it requires accepting two fundamental axioms. First, global risks such as pandemics are expressed at both the national and local level. Second, no country alone can prevent such occurrences or mitigate their impact.

Unfortunately, many leaders do not seem to understand these rules. What they mostly agree on is that unprecedented economic measures are needed to address a simultaneous demand and supply shock of this magnitude and duration. As citizens wait for these measures to be implemented, each community is being tested.

Governments and businesses can confront these challenges by learning about – and strengthening – their resilience, a term associated historically with stress testing materials or structures in engineering. Following the post-2008 Great Recession, resilience emerged as a core concept for addressing global financial risks. For example, in the 2013 edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, resilience was defined as the capacity for “bouncing back faster after stress, enduring greater stresses, and being disturbed less by a given amount of stress.”

Read more at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/how-to-boost-global-resilience-to-covid-19/