ANNALISA DEL VECCHIO WRITES – I am an international student, a senior studying at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. I am Italian, and my roommate is Chinese. We share mutual sentiments regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in our home countries. After the initial lockdown announcement in Los Angeles, we purchased…
STUART MULJADI WRITES — “The day the earth stood still” is the best way to describe the past couple of weeks. COVID-19 has divided countries, tanked economies and businesses and, worst of all, the virus has caused a shortage of the world’s supply of toilet paper. People’s daily lives are…
TOM PLATE WRITES – Adept moral leadership at the top, whether in Washington or Hong Kong, is central to any serious public-health strategy. ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed on the world,’ famously wrote the poet William Butler Yeats in 1919. One hundred years later, here…
CAMILLE BRYAN WRITES — It is the most basic of diplomatic issues between the People’s Republic of China and the United States: Misconceptions and fears over each country’s motives, especially in a time of global crisis, bring nerves over the pandemic to a dangerous level. Many people in the United…
ZHI JIAO DANIELLE GOH WRITES — As news of different countries locking down and closing their borders increases, the online world, however, has been more connected than ever. In particular, higher-education institutions around the world are aiming to short-circuit the developing pandemic by transforming their classroom pedagogy into smart, virtual,…
SARAH SHARPE WRITES – The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed this country into the most chaotic I have ever seen! I have never been more scared and confused, simultaneously. The shutdown of LMU, along with many other college campuses, has dramatically shifted the lives of students and faculty. Places of work…
CHARLOTTE TRUONG WRITES – China is Vietnam’s largest market for agricultural and aquatic products, accounting for about 27% of total agricultural and fishery exports each year. According to the United Nations Comtrade database on international trade, during 2017 Vietnam exported US$35.39 billion from China. But now, due to the outbreak…
SARAH SHARPE WRITES — Will the Asian tourism business ever fully recover from the coronavirus? A recent article in The Guardian, the brilliant London-based dally newspaper, details the effects that the COVID-19 outbreak has had on popular tourism sites, with pictures of popular Asian before and after sites: before the…
SENAY EMMANUEL WRITES — I am a fourth-year undergraduate student at a well-known university in Los Angeles, California. I am set to graduate in a few months and move to Washington D.C. to work at a non-profit. Life was all planned and prepared, and as commencement neared, I gradually filled…
EXCERPTED FROM THE ‘BUSINESS INSIDER’ — Medical workers in Wuhan, China, removed their masks after the city closed the last temporary hospital, which was panic-built to accommodate the overflow patients from the coronavirus outbreak. The viral video, which has been viewed more than three million times, showed a number of workers…
OUR COLLEAGUES AT THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE ON NORTH KOREA WRITE — As COVID-19 intensifies in the United States and elsewhere, the North Korean response to the pandemic is fading from the headlines. However, NCNK is continuing to monitor the situation through regular contact with a wide range of information sources.…
TOM PLATE WRITES – How bad will the global-corona epidemic get? ‘Only the future will tell.’ The problem with that lame cliché is that the future is not only with us now but – to scramble the possibilities – the future actually influences the past. Astrophysicist-author John Gribbin, whose challenging new book ‘Six…
TOM PLATE WRITES (VIA THE KOREA TIMES OF SEOUL) — As horrible as the coronavirus spread looks right now, it may not be the worst that faces us. My worry is that even after the epidemic begins its remission, what happens is that everything returns to normal. And that’s the…
FROM THE STAFF OF THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE ON NORTH KOREA IN WASHINGTON — With the spread of Coronavirus (COVID19) the National Committee on North Korea has been receiving inquiries about the situation in North Korea. We can report that a significant element of the population is at special risk given…
ASIAMEDIA WRITES — Whatever the actual degree of utility of the medical mask, there is no doubt in Asia of their current ubiquity. These sample shots below, in order, come from the world-famous Shanghai Ballet; a recent wedding in Seoul, South Korea; yet another anti-government protest in Hong Kong; and…
SARAH SHARPE WRITES — The coronavirus, recently named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization, has completely dominated international media outlets and caused hysteria and travel paranoia. The fast-spreading virus has been documented in countries beyond China such as Japan, Germany, and the U.S. With (at this writing) more than 1,000 reported…
