On whom the crash in the price of bitcoin would have been blamed other than coronavirus (COVID-19)!
Last week, the Independent reported of how the price of bitcoin plummeted dramatically, losing 20 percent of its value in less than an hour.
The deadly disease is making inroads into various countries of the world. It forcefully shut down cities and cracked down on businesses.
Not only bitcoin; several other major cryptocurrencies are experiencing similar fate. Have not the major football leagues in the world ben postponed or cancelled?
The COVID-19 is doing the unusual. It conspires against the whole universe. It tactically fights in person and by proxy.
In person, the pandemic has infected hundreds of thousands of people in 130 countries. Cases have doubled from 75,000 in February to 153,000 in March.
Aljazeera reports that over 1,800 persons have been killed by the disease with a total number of nearly 25,000 cases in Italy, the worst-hit country after China (the cradle of the pandemic).
The outbreak of Coronavirus in the People’s Republic of China has a devastating effect on the country’s economy. This, summarily, has affected almost every sector. Retail sales, industrial output, investment, what is more, all plunged in the world’s second largest economy.
Adrian Zuercher, the Head, Asia Pacific Asset Allocation told CCN Business that China is going though the hardest time ever.
According to Worldometers, the People’s Republic of China recorded the total number of 80,880 cases, a total of 3,213 people have died of the disease and 67, 848 have recovered. In essence, currently China has 9,848 active cases with 3,226 in a critical condition.
However, Spain has imposed a nationwide lockdown. Over 2,000 cases have so far been confirmed. The number of casualty is multiplying. People have been asked to remain indoors except for essential tasks.
In the United States of America there came the announcement of a break in the largest education system. Schools will remain closed till April 20. The USA has recorded 61 coronavirus-related death and over 3,244 cases of the disease confirmed.
The USA’s death toll in relation to the pandemic may be fewer compared to other countries like Iran that has recorded not less than 1,000 deaths. Yet the effect is telling as more restaurants, schools, businesses closed down to stymie the spread.
The United States of America, they say, is considering enforcement of ‘social distance’ and ‘flatten the nerves’ – meaning hundreds of thousands of infections may occur; but they don’t have to happen at once – as the outbreak of the virus escalates.
By proxy, for instance, Nigeria has just recorded two cases of the lethal disease; but its disastrous impact on the country’s economy is nothing to write home about.
Nigerian government budget $37 billion with a benchmark oil price of $57 per barrel. Unfortunately, crude oil price has fallen below $30 per barrel, triggering dollar shortage in the country.
A report titled Nigeria: Counting cost of global oil price crash published on The Nation of March 15, 2020, highlighted how the crash, following the spread of COVID-19, has affected the economy of many (under)developing countries, Nigeria inclusive, due to direct or indirect structural dependence,
Oil revenue accounts for about 85% of Nigeria’s foreign exchange and it is the major driver of the country’s economy.
The report quoted the Director-General, Lagos Chamber of Commerce, Dr Muda Yusuf, as saying: “The global supply chain has been deeply disrupted as China, which is the second largest economy in the world, is a major supplier of inputs for manufacturing companies around the world, Nigeria inclusive. Many manufacturers and service providers in the country are already experiencing acute shortage of raw materials and intermediate inputs…”
This scary moment reminds me of Sumbuka. Though the part of the world where I was born and raised was somehow peaceful then and the idea of war was far-fetched and pandemic at rest, everyone was scared. For months, probably half a year, children stayed at home under the watchful eyes of their mothers. Almost everyone was indoors.
Young, old, men and women were apprehensive of where and when the coquettish old woman would appear. They said she would come with a huge bundle of untidy clothes on her head.
The issue was that of death and life. Surreal barricades were set up at every house entrance to fend her off. The houses were ringed with a powdery mixture of ashes and pepper.
Was Sumbuka a disease? No, they said Sumbuka feared the mixture more than her God. That combustible mixture was the only thing that prevented her from entering into any home in sight.
There was neither a bloody sight nor casualty recorded; but if Sumbuka managed to sneak into a home, we were told, she would ask for water; drink her fill and give back the leftover; that is the end of it all. Death would descend upon the household and ravish it overnight.
That was how the endemic nature of the death agent, Sumbuka, had come and passed. Time is so fleeting. Even mentioning the name of the death emissary shook one to the marrow. Who dared pronounce the name above whisper?
The only difference is that that war was spiritual.
In the 1990s, long before that, they said, there was the outbreak of an acute diarrheal disease caused by Vibrio cholerae called cholera.
Both the raging infiltration of COVID-19 into many countries and the instance above of the superstitiously exaggerated agent of death, ‘Sumbuka’, are typical depictions of human condition, which can be translated into ‘human weakness’ – tragic flaw.
This is a common practice in literary works. Chinua Achebe has it in his first novel, “Things Fall Apart”. Destiny exploited Okwonkwo’s feeling of self-importance. There he is hanged like a dog.
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, out of a burning desire to “outperform others” Victor invents a monster, sets it against himself, his family and his society. Toward the end of the novel, Victor and the monster hold onto the jugulars of each other. They finish themselves up in an ‘endless’ ice bed.
As the spread of Coronavirus rages on laying bare the tenuous nature of human condition on this earth, one remembers Albert Camus’ The Plague. The 1947 novel depicts how a plague sweeps the French Algerian city of Oran, killing a large percentage of its population.
ED Vulliamy, a British journalist, wrote the following in his Albert Camus’ The Plague: a story for our, and all, times:
“Of all Camus’ novels, none describes man’s confrontation – and cohabitation –with death so vividly and on such an epic scale as La Peste, translated as The Plague. Most of us read The Plague as teenagers, and we should all read it again. And again: for not are all humankind’s responses to death represented in it, but now – with the advent of Ebola [now COVID-19] – the book works on the literal as well as metaphorical.”
Man has caused untold sufferings to fellow man more than anything on this world through ‘othering’. Weapons of mass destruction have been invented and diseases man-made and natural spread – today coronavirus is, so sad, doing what man has sought to do to a fellow man. Almighty Allah, have mercy on us all.
Abdulhamid writes via [email protected]
