Lorenzo Codogno, a visiting professor in practice at the LSE’s European Institute, founder of LC Macro Advisors Ltd and former chief economist and director general at the Treasury Department of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, gave his thoughts on how coronavirus epidemic will be tackled in Britain.
Sputnik: Could the outbreak of the Coronavirus in the UK reach Italy-like levels?
Lorenzo Codogno: I think there is a clear risk for that. As you know; the government in the UK was in denial at the beginning, but I think the situation has changed quite rapidly, and they are now basically following exactly the same steps that are in place in Italy and in other countries in Asia.
There is now a kind of global approach to these matters. The only difference is that clearly you have to apply these steps depending on the stage of the spreading, and depending on the specific situation of the country.
We know that there has been a lack of ventilators and medical equipment and stuff like that, so if the UK has two weeks’ worth of lag time, then you should use this time to kind of be prepared, so to speak.
Sputnik: Why has the death toll from the Coronavirus in Italy been so high?
Lorenzo Codogno: It’s very difficult to tell; but probably the most important reason for the high death toll in Italy, is that it is a country with a population that is ageing very rapidly, so most of the people that are affected are people well above seventy, and the average age of people affected in Italy is sixty three, so much higher than in China or in other places, and that might also explain the high number of deaths.
I have to say; that it has probably been underestimated as well, because Italy will do the final count only at the very end, because many people simply die from other diseases, and nobody tracks, or has the time to track whether there was also the Coronavirus involved, so I think that the final count will be only at the end I guess.
Sputnik: How will the Coronavirus impact Italy’s and the world’s economy as a whole?
Lorenzo Codogno: The impact will be substantial, there hasn’t been such a shock since World War Two, so it’s really massive, massive meaning that you can expect at least two or three months of almost complete shutdown of the economy.
The recovery will also be slow, because it takes time for the companies to be back in business, for workers to move back, demand doesn’t pick up immediately, and so on and so forth, so I think it will take a while to recover.
Many countries around the world will be affected, and at different stages. For the whole world economy to recover; you need to have all the major countries already having passed the point of improvement, and we know that in the UK the situation is lagging behind that of Italy, in the US it is just starting now, so I think that we are not yet at the worst point of the contagion.
