Economic measures implemented by Mediterranean EU states to respond to the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

In December 2019 there were talks about a virus originating in the city of Wuhan, in the Hubei province of China. A pandemic knows no geographical boundaries, and what seemed like an event confined within the borders of China, and a problem of theirs, quickly spread across the world. On 11th of February 2020, the International Committee on Taxonomy of Virus (ICTV) gave the name “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-Cov-2, to the virus that started all this and on the same day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) gave the name “COVID-19” to the disease caused by this virus (Naming the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and the virus that causes it, 2021). The first report of COVID-19 has been traced back to 15th December 2019 while the first death was reported on the 11th of January 2020 (Taylor, 2021). During that same month, the virus spread across a number of regions in China such that the country’s national health commission declared that the virus could be transmitted between humans, and in response, the leader of China took actions to stop the spread of the virus by putting Wuhan on strict lockdown (Katella, 2021). On the 13th of January 2020, the first case outside China was reported in Thailand (Neilson & Woodward, 2020). The confirmed cases in China increased from 218 on the 20th of January to 10,000 cases by 1st February 2021. All the G7 economies, with the exclusion of Canada, reported their first Covid19 cases by the end of January. On the 30th of January 2020, the World Health Organisation declared the COVID-19 outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern” and on the 11th of March 2020 escalated the outbreak to a pandemic (Askitas, Tatsiramos, & Verheyden, 2020).