The Context: COVID-19, Global Development Agendas and Tourism
This chapter provides the context in which the book “Counting the Cost of COVID-19 on Global Tourism Industry” is written, including highlights for what follows in the rest of the book. The COVID-19 pandemic came when the world was in the midst of enterta
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The Context: COVID-19, Global Development Agendas and Tourism
Abstract This chapter provides the context in which the book “Counting the Cost of COVID-19 on Global Tourism Industry” is written, including highlights for what follows in the rest of the book. The COVID-19 pandemic came when the world was in the midst of entertaining major global development agendas that had implications on the global tourism value chains. Among such major global development agendas, one could list the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its aligned 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework and Habitat III’s New Urban Agenda. The pandemic also steered geopolitical and global economic tensions as key players, including individuals and countries, demanded answers as to what led to such a wild and unstoppable spread of the coronavirus. Accusations of maladministration within the World Health Organization (WHO) and connivance with China emerged. Many countries battled to “flatten” the runaway COVID-19 and economic curves. Many countries and territories went on lockdown, with millions infected and hundreds of thousands dead by the time this book was going into production. Global economic stimulus packages were urgently instituted, and the tourism sector was among the top beneficiaries of such packages. The chapter also presents sections on the importance of the tourism sector to the global economy and how past pandemics affected the sector. It further highlights the overall methodological framework used for data generation and analysis. Keywords Tourism · COVID-19 · SDGs · Geopolitics · WHO · Methodology · China · Stimulus
1.1 Introduction On 31 December 2019, the world woke up to the WHO announcement that China had notified it of pneumonia cases of an unknown cause in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China (WHO 2020a). Within 3 days from the notification to 3 January © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 G. Nhamo et al., Counting the Cost of COVID-19 on the Global Tourism Industry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56231-1_1
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1 The Context: COVID-19, Global Development Agendas and Tourism
2020, there were 44 case-patients with so-called pneumonia. The source of the infection was identified as the seafood market in Wuhan, with the disease referred to initially as the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). As time passed, the 2019-nCoV was renamed COVID-19, with the cause being the SARS-2 coronavirus (SARS- CoV-2) (Backer et al. 2020). The WHO declared the COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, sending huge shock waves across the global community (WHO 2020b). COVID-19 was also known to spread from human to human through droplets and contact, making it a deadly infectious disease (Peng et al. 2020). From the knowledge gathered at the time, COVID-19 was fortunately sensitive to disinfection measures, although it could survive for hours on surfaces in the environment. The main known symptoms were fever, cough
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