Did Globalization and Open Borders Help Spread Covid-19? On the 3rd of February 2020, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) urged all countries not to impose travel bans to stop the spread of Covid-19. On the 10th of March, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, criticized Austria and Slovenia for closing their borders with Italy, saying that these countries had made “bad decisions.” On the 13th of March, a top adviser to the WHO said that restricting movement wouldn’t help in the fight against the virus.
By April the 1st, 91% of the global population, or 7.1 billion people, were living in countries that had imposed some sort of travel restrictions. This begs the question: should governments around the world have imposed travel bans and border restrictions earlier in the fight against Covid-19? It’s certainly plausible that if governments had acted quicker to impose restrictions on travel, Covid-19 may very well have been a localized epidemic in eastern Asia, as opposed to a globalized issue that has wreaked havoc on most countries and economies around the world.
One study that was conducted by network specialists from Northeastern University indicated that travel bans at least delayed the spread of Covid-19 when they were implemented in China, and in combination with transmission control measures, they dampened the virulence of Covid-19.
What is certainly clear more broadly is that, in a globalized world, diseases can spread around the world at a faster pace than any other time in history. The decline in the power of nation-states produced by the increased flow of people and capital across borders, has reduced the checks and barriers that national border controls used to provide. The fact that a globalized world also has created a system of interdependence has also been highlighted by the pandemic.
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