Daily Times

The attacks of deadly virus are rapidly increasing and affecting all countries around the world. This virus attack on humanity proved that investment on defense and other luxuries providing sectors is useless until and unless your citizens are not healthy and this is actually ground reality. This pandemic told us that what should be the priorities of strategic planners and policy makers while allocating funds for different sectors.

World’s most powerful countries are also badly affected by current pandemic. These developed countries have best available resources and facilities in all sectors for their citizens. Even developing and poor countries have also always tried to provide, at least, some basic facilities to their citizens with their limited resources.

In past, world experienced deadly wars for trade, oil, treasures, water and territories and also different escalated battles and issues which killed millions of people. One of the most powerful military giant United States and coalition forces showered daisy cutter bombs from stealth technology aircrafts and fired advance cruise missiles from aircraft carriers on different poor countries with or without any reason to secure the so-called future of their future generations. We also experienced cold and proxy wars in different regions which killed millions of people and damaged infrastructures.

Different countries have different strengths. Some countries are powerful in defense and arm race, some are strong in technology and trade and some countries are stable in other sectors. These all countries have one agenda to plan and save their countries and citizens from enemies or unnecessarily take over other small countries to expand their borders. For this purpose these wealthy economies are spending billions of dollars on defense or on technologies to take lead.

Although these countries have also advance facilities in education, health and other public service sectors but all of sudden, one small viral disease started from China has changed the scenario of their strategic planning.

Their modern aircrafts, guns, bombs and missiles all were ready on their airbases and on giant aircraft carriers on hot and cold waters. But unfortunately, due this virus, nobody is available even to touch or operate these assets. In other words, all these strategic assets are currently useless. Now all countries are using their regular and paramilitary troops to provide medical and health facilities without any discrimination to their rich and poor citizens.

Their mega factories which were producing world’s best products including automobiles, computers, smart phones, arms etc. are closed at the moment due to the enforced lock-down implemented by the governments to protect their citizens from the virus. Their five-star passenger planes are parked on airports and nobody is even ready to fly these machines. Tourism, hoteling, cinemas, parks and in-short all activities are forcefully stopped just for the sake of good health of their citizens.

No doubt, all developed countries provided maximum facilities to their citizens and developing countries are also trying to do so. But on the other hand, each and every country also allocated heavy budgets on defense and other related sectors for the sake of their safety and stability.

All manufacturing units are focusing to produce health related surgical equipment and relevant medicines to cope with the current pandemic disease. Previously, why we were not focusing to provide maximum health facilities to masses and why we were not ready to tackle these types of situations. Its not only in poor countries, the richest countries are also facing same problems.

We also learnt from corona virus that apart from all developments all over the world, the priority sectors have dramatically changed. Mega units which were producing luxurious products or services are closed down and labor is jobless and employers are in process to lay off their extra workforce for cost cutting.

Tourism, leisure, aviation, maritime, automotive, construction, real estate, manufacturing of non-essential commodities, and financial services are turned into least potential sectors.

However, agriculture, food processing, retailers, ICT, e-commerce, education, personal healthcare products, medical and surgical items, and relevant service providers are now high potential sectors during the current pandemic and even these sectors are also important in any other types of disasters as well.

Secondly, with this disaster, we also learnt that our healthy immune system is very important to fight with any communicable disease so for this we should also need to change our lifestyle and as much as we can go back to nature that can help us to keep ourselves active, healthy and happy.

Health of everybody is important no matter person is rich or poor, industrialist or worker, landlord or tenant, officer or clerk. If he is not healthy, his all wealth, facilities and even blood relatives cannot help him to keep him/her live.

So, the lesson learnt from COVID-19 is that policy makers should focus on health sector and its relevant sectors, this will strengthen and enable the health sectors to provide all health facilities to maximum of the affected citizens without any delay.

Supply of basic food items is also very important, so, globally, governments should also plan to allocate funds for agriculture research, production and food security so that people can have uninterrupted food supply in any case of disasters.

Information technology has also provided maximum facilities and enabled all public and private sectors to tackle or to work remotely for any given task. We just need to improve our data management, internet and networking facilities so that service providers from public private departments can work and serve the citizens without and hurdle.

The writer is associated with Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and views expressed by him are his own and do not necessarily reflect SDPI’s official stance.