Jim O’Neill, British economist and chair of UK think tank Chatham House believes India would have failed to react as efficiently as China did have the coronavirus originated from India.
“Thank God this didn’t start in somewhere like India because there’s absolutely no way that the quality of Indian governance could move to react in the way that the Chinese have done, that’s the good side of the Chinese model, and I think you could probably say the same about Brazil too,” said Jim in a program Squawk Box Europe on CNBC.
'Thank God this didn't start in India': Jim O'Neill praises China's coronavirus response https://t.co/aCnLuSkO96
— CNBC (@CNBC) March 11, 2020
He said this while appreciating China’s ‘fast aggressive’ approach to control the spread of coronavirus. He was skeptical of the abilities of India’s government to efficiently deal with a medical calamity like coronavirus.
As per the latest WHO reports, India has 50 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had convened a meeting this weekend and directed officials to identify locations for quarantine facilities and make provisions for critical care.
The Indian government has even initiated an awareness campaign and imposed various travel restrictions in efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus in the country.
India has not reported any death from coronavirus hence experts believe the epidemic is under control in India. Meanwhile, an American researcher Nicholas A. Christakis did a detailed Twitter thread to explain how China contained coronavirus 101.
Read more: WHO declares Coronavirus the worst pandemic as Europe struggles
In a comprehensive account of the measures China took he stressed the authoritarian and autocratic dispensation in the country that facilitated the Chinese government to implement stringent precautionary initiatives across the country to control the pandemic.
He praised the timely actions of the Chinese government through the use of the social nuclear weapon. He noted that while China reported the highest number of cases around 80,859, the number of new cases has gradually dropped from 100 per day to 46 per day in a country with a population of 1.4 billion.
For him, this a remarkable achievement and sign of effective administration by the Chinese government that drastically mitigated the spread of the epidemic in the country.
In times like this one needs to be extremely dumb or wicked to talk in divisive terms. Wondering what this guy was. https://t.co/CnfQDzCtjh #Corona #JimONeill #Covid19
— Abhilash Annadurai (@abhilash_171) March 12, 2020
The aggressive measures used by China reflect the severity of the disease and he explained the phenomenon in the context of Newton’s physics metaphor. British economist said that other countries including India should emulate the model and measures taken by China to control the epidemic.