Sachs: Pandemic Crisis Will Last Two Years, Things Won't Be the Same

Virus

U.S. economist and professor at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs said on March 30 that the impact of the novel coronavirus in New York was comparable to a devastating earthquake or tsunami and that the global crisis in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic would last at least two years and that "things will never be the same again," and that there would be a new normal.

Speaking via video conference with Vuk Jeremic, head of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development and the People's Party, Sachs said in New York that this American city was now a hotspot of the epidemic. He said that New York's hospitals were full, its people dying and that there was a shortage of the necessary equipment. The city is closed, but this is happening in other parts of the world. The U.S. and the City of New York were completely unprepared and by the time people understood the scope of the disaster, the virus had spread wide, he explained.

CIRSD has launched a series titled Corona Dialogs, where Jeremic will talk to the world's best known experts in various fields to shed more light on the Covid-19 pandemic and its global fallout.

The first discussion was with Sachs, one of the world's greatest living economists and public intellectuals.

Jeremic, also a former head of the U.N. General Assembly, said the pandemic that has the world in its grip is unprecedented and that chaos too is spreading across the planet, as almost a third of the global population is in some form of lockdown, and the rest is probably headed there; meanwhile, global stock and goods markets are in free fall.