[February Tournament 2022] The majority of the world is better thanks to Covid.

About 9.2% of the world, or 689 million people, live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank.

almost half the world’s population — 3.4 billion people — still struggles to meet basic needs, the World Bank said. 

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Health is now a part of global food, environment, oil, and water agreements, and it is addressed at major global and regional summits, including the G7 and G20 summits. Every SDG that has been negotiated has shown that health is an important component and outcome. Therefore, this explains why GHD plays a central role in every subsequent round of SDG-related negotiations. Given this background, the global health agenda is now viewed as a common challenge for developing and developed nations (13). COVID-19 offers many different examples of health diplomacy but is mostly characterized by fragmentation. There is much evidence showing the aspects of poor leadership and cooperation between big countries. Amid this fragmentation, as a regional response, the European Union (EU) vaccine initiative emerged recently independent of the WHO (7). GHD can be interpreted as a political shift toward achieving the goals of improving global health while maintaining and strengthening broad international relations, particularly in the areas affected by conflicts and limitation of resources (14). The first UN General Assembly resolution on the coronavirus (UNGA 270.74) called for international cooperations to combat the virus (5). In short, we discuss a few large economies that failed to show their leadership or direction to the other developing nations in many aspects and have failed even in diplomacy with their counterparts.

The World Bank Group is taking broad, fast action to help developing countries strengthen their pandemic response, increase disease surveillance, improve public health interventions, and help the private sector continue to operate and sustain jobs. Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, the Bank Group has committed over $157 billion to fight the impacts of the pandemic. Provided from April 2020 to June 2021, it includes over $50 billion of IDA resources on grant and highly concessional terms.

On April 2, 2020 the first group of projects using the dedicated COVID-19 Fast-Track Facility (also called the COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Program (SPRP)), amounting to $1.9 billion and assisting 25 countries, was rolled out. On May 19, 2020 the Bank Group announced its emergency operations to fight COVID-19 have reached 100 developing countries – home to 70% of the world’s population. On October 13, 2020, $12 billion was approved for developing countries to finance the purchase and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments for their citizens. On June 30, 2021 President Malpass announced the expansion of financing available for COVID-19 vaccine financing to $20 billion over the next 18 months, adding $8 billion to the previously announced $12 billion. In addition, the World Bank is working worldwide to redeploy resources in existing World Bank financed projects, including through restructuring and use of projects’ emergency components as well as contingent financing instruments designed for catastrophes, including pandemics.

A reduction in water travel and activity could reduce the risk of ships striking and injuring or killing marine animals. It may also reduce the marine disruption that occurs due to noise pollution from ships, fishing sonar, and recreational boats.

The pandemic may even benefit wildlife by disrupting the hidden, generally illegal supply chains that destroy wild populations, including those that fuel the wildlife trade.

One study found that daily global CO2 levels dropped by 17% during the early months of the pandemic. Similarly, other research showed that levels of the pollutant nitric dioxide lowered drastically, by 20–40%, across the U.S., Western Europe, and China.

An analysis of data from 44 Chinese cities also found that pandemic travel restrictions resulted in reductions of between 4.58% and 24.67% in five major air pollutants.

An American study suggests the reason for this, finding that between March 27 and May 14, 2020, in one Massachusetts neighborhood, car travel reduced by 71%, and truck traffic fell by 46%.

Experts suggest that the unprecedented decrease in air pollutant emissions during the pandemic could reduce seasonal ozone concentrations.

Prior to the pandemic, many businesses viewed technology as a means to save money and reduce unnecessary spending. When data can be analyzed and emails automatically sent when triggered, for example, it frees up the sales team and marketing team to focus on other tasks that cannot be handled through automation and technology. However, a digital transformation also offers businesses tremendous opportunities to innovate and find their way to the front of their industry.

Before the pandemic hit, nearly half of businesses reported that they saw technology as a means of reducing company costs as one of their top three digital priorities. However, with the pandemic spreading and businesses beginning to discover the other values of technology, only 10 percent reported this as a top reason after the beginning of the shutdowns. Instead, more businesses reported that modernizing their capabilities, gaining a competitive advantage, and creating a business culture that was focused around digital technologies all outpaced concerns about reducing costs.

1. Accelerating education inequality: Education inequality is accelerating in an unprecedented fashion, especially where before the pandemic it was already high

2. A leapfrog moment: Innovation has suddenly moved from the margins to the center of many education systems, and there is an opportunity to identify new strategies, that if sustained, can help young people get an education that prepares them for our changing times.

This unprecedented acceleration of education inequality requires new responses. In our ongoing work on education innovation, we have argued that there are examples of new strategies or approaches that could, if scaled up, have the potential to rapidly accelerate, or leapfrog, progress. Two years ago, in “Leapfrogging inequality: Remaking education to help young people thrive,” we set forth a leapfrog pathway laying out a map to harness education innovations to much more quickly close the gap in education inequality. We argued that at two decades into the 21st century, the goal should be for all children to become lifelong learners and develop the full breadth of skills and competencies—from literacy to problem-solving to collaboration—that they will need to access a changing world of work and be constructive citizens in society. We defined education innovation as an idea or technology that is new to a current context, if not new to the world. And we proposed that those innovations that could help provide a broader menu of options for delivering learning were those with the potential to help leapfrog education, namely:

1) innovative pedagogical approaches alongside direct instruction to help young people not only remember and understand but analyze and create;

2) new ways of recognizing learning alongside traditional measures and pathways;

3) crowding in a diversity of people and places alongside professional teachers to help support learning in school; and

4) smart use of technology and data that allowed for real-time adaptation and did not simply replace analog approaches.

When we surveyed almost 3,000 education innovations across over 160 countries, we found that some innovations had the potential to help leapfrog progress, as defined along our four dimensions, and many did not. We also found that many of the promising innovations were on the margins of education systems and not at the center of how learning takes place. We argued that to rapidly accelerate progress and close the equity gaps in education, the wide range of actors involved in delivering education to young people would need to spend more time documenting, learning from, evaluating, and scaling those innovative approaches that held the most leapfrog potential.

Today we are facing a very different context. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced education innovation into the heart of almost every education system around the globe. Based on a recent 59-country survey of educators and education administrators, Fernando Reimers and Andreas Schleicher note that: “The crisis has revealed the enormous potential for innovation that is dormant in many education systems.”[1] The question is no longer how to scale innovations from the margin to the center of education systems but how to transform education systems so that they will source, support, and sustain those innovations that address inequality and provide all young people with the skills to build a better future for themselves and their communities. By doing this, we ultimately hope not only that those who are left behind can catch up, but that a new, more equal education system can emerge out of the crisis. Fortunately, across the world, communities are increasingly valuing the role that schools play, not only for student learning, but also for the livelihoods of educators, parents, and others, as we discuss below.

3. Rising public support: There is newfound public recognition of how essential schools are in society and a window of opportunity to leverage this support for making them stronger

4. New education allies: The pandemic has galvanized new actors in the community—from parents to social welfare organizations—to support children’s learning like never before.

Alongside increasing recognition of the essential role of public schools, the pandemic has galvanized parts of communities that traditionally are not actively involved in children’s education. As school buildings closed, teachers began to partner with parents in ways never done before, schools formed new relationships with community health and social welfare organizations, media companies worked with education leaders, technology companies partnered with nonprofits and governments, and local nonprofits and businesses contributed to supporting children’s learning in new ways.

The idea of children’s education being supported by an ecosystem of learning opportunities in and outside of school is not new among educationalists. The community schools movement envisions schools as the hub of children’s education and development, with strong partnerships among other sectors from health to social welfare. Schools remain open all day and are centers for community engagement, services, and problem-solving. Proponents of “life-wide” learning approaches point out that children from birth to 18 years of age spend only up to 20 percent of their waking hours at school and argue that the fabric of the community offers many enriching learning experiences alongside school. In our own work on leapfrogging in education, we argue that diversifying the educators and places where children learn can crowd in innovative pedagogical approaches and complement and enrich classroom-based learning. More recently, the concept of local learning ecoystems has emerged to describe learning opportunities provided through a web of collaboration among schools, community organizations, businesses, and government agencies that often pair direct instruction with innovative pedagogies allowing for experimentation.There is evidence ranging from the U.K. to Nicaragua that young people engaging in diverse learning opportunities outside of school—from classic extracurricular activities such as music lessons to nonformal education programming—can be quite helpful in boosting the skills and academic competencies of marginalized children. But until recently there has been only limited empirical examples of local learning ecosystems. Emerging models are appearing in places such as Catalonia, Spain with its Educacio360 initiative and Western Pennsylvania, where several U.S. school districts have engaged in a multiyear Remake Learning initiative to offer life-wide learning opportunities to families and children. One of the opportunities emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic may just be the chance to harness the new energies and mindsets between schools and communities to work together to support children’s learning.

Remote Working

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is not identical across each sector, but almost all industries saw an unprecedented shift in the way they operate. For physical retail and hospitality this meant mass closures and furloughed staff, while for other businesses it meant a spike in remote working as offices were forced to close.

In April, when the first nationwide lockdown was in effect, 46% of the UK workforce did at least some work at home, with 86% doing so as a direct result of the pandemic. The shift away from the office was even more pronounced in the US, with an estimated 56.8% of employed Americans working from home at least some of the time. The “new normal” of work has brought increased flexibility to many jobs but also created new difficulties as traditional avenues for networking and employee onboarding have been restricted.

Some, like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, believe the current state of affairs is an “aberration” that will die out once the pandemic is under control. However, among SMEs there is every indication that the shift to remote working will be permanent. Most firms have seen workplace productivity remain steady or even improve after shifting to a remote working model, and physical offices remain a significant overhead for smaller companies. With some analysts estimating that as much as 70% of the US workforce will be spending time working remotely by 2025, it’s easy to imagine that a good number of firms will seize the opportunity to change their working models for good.

Most firms have seen workplace productivity remain steady or even improve after shifting to a remote working model.

Financial Sector Digitisation

Hand in hand with the flight from physical offices, the pandemic has brought the benefits and foibles of digital tools into focus. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the financial services sector; in a single week during March 2020, the use of fintech apps and mobile banking services leapt 72% in Europe. Trading apps gained millions of active users on the back of stock market volatility and stay-at-home orders, sending Robinhood daily trading averages above 4.3 million in June.

In a single week during March 2020, the use of fintech apps and mobile banking services leapt 72% in Europe.

More traditional institutions have been forced to adapt to meet their more tech-savvy challengers as their legacy systems come under increasing strain. For major banks, with profit margins cut drastically by pandemic-induced credit loss provisions, this has meant placing greater focus on improving their online portals and security measures and diverting resources from the high street. HSBC has announced plans to close 82 of its UK branches as a direct consequence of this shift in strategy. Barclays and Lloyds Bank intend to shut down 63 and 56 branches respectively, while the Bank of Ireland aims to close 103 – more than a third of its locations.

Growth of eCommerce

According to a UNCTAD study, both developed and developing nations saw a historic rise in eCommerce sales even as individual customer expenditure fell. US and Canadian eCommerce orders in particular grew 129% year-on-year from April 2019 to April 2020.

This move was hardly unprecedented; the 2003 SARS crisis left a lasting impact on business by launching the growth of Alibaba, JD.com and other Chinese businesses that have since become giants. Indeed, the strongest rises in online shopping during the COVID-19 era were seen in Turkey and China, with Chinese communication platforms WeChat, DingTalk and Tencent Conference benefiting from heightened interest from businesses just as Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams did in western markets.

As for the grades and adapting to Covid restrictions being troubling for schools, I don't think this hurt the majority of the world and will explain why. If something hurts everybody and is based on bell-curve output, it has actually not really 'hurt' the majority of the world at all. If the entire planet was pretty much affected by struggling to adapt to long-distance learning, it would mean that if anything more allowance, lenience and compassion to struggling students was given, compared to ever before. This is supported, for instance, by the fact that for the first time since computers began being involved in learning, nations began to have freely given/borrowed computers to the children of poorer families in nations such as the US, UK, France etc. 

https://tinyurl.com/y4nusum4

1. Accelerating education inequality: Education inequality is accelerating in an unprecedented fashion, especially where before the pandemic it was already high

2. A leapfrog moment: Innovation has suddenly moved from the margins to the center of many education systems, and there is an opportunity to identify new strategies, that if sustained, can help young people get an education that prepares them for our changing times.

The majority of the world is better thanks to Covid.

Rising public support: There is newfound public recognition of how essential schools are in society and a window of opportunity to leverage this support for making them stronger

4. New education allies: The pandemic has galvanized new actors in the community—from parents to social welfare organizations—to support children’s learning like never before.

Severe learning losses and worsening inequalities in education

Results from global simulations of the effect of school closures on learning are now being corroborated by country estimates of actual learning losses. Evidence from Brazil, rural Pakistan, rural India, South Africa, and Mexico, among others, shows substantial losses in math and reading. In some low- and middle-income countries, on average, learning losses are roughly proportional to the length of the closures—meaning that each month of school closures led to a full month of learning losses (Figure 1, selected LMICs and HICs presents an average effect of 100% and 43%, respectively), despite the best efforts of decision makers, educators, and families to maintain continuity of learning. 

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For example, results from two states in Mexico show significant learning losses in reading and in math for students aged 10-15. The estimated learning losses were greater in math than reading, and they disproportionately affected younger learners, students from low-income backgrounds, and girls.

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• Children from low-income households, children with disabilities, and girls were less likely to access remote learning due to limited availability of electricity, connectivity, devices, accessible technologies as well as discrimination and social and gender norms.
  
• Younger students had less access to age-appropriate remote learning and were more affected by learning loss than older students. Pre-school-age children, who are at a pivotal stage for learning and development, faced a double disadvantage as they were often left out of remote learning and school reopening plans.
  
• Learning losses were greater for students of lower socioeconomic status in various countries, including Ghana, Mexico, and Pakistan.
  
• While the gendered impact of school closures on learning is still emerging, initial evidence points to larger learning losses among girls, including in South Africa and Mexico
  

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Beyond learning, growing evidence shows the negative effects school closures have had on students’ mental health and well-being, health and nutrition, and protection, reinforcing the vital role schools play in providing comprehensive support and services to students.

As for the jobs struggling aspect, while of course jobs that involved interaction suffered, I don't think ever before have healthcare workers been so appreciated and valued (sad but true). I also think that from delivery work through to website development and even surveillance and data analysis work, many jobs and careers opened up much more than before while other lines of work and even study became more accessible because online teaching at university level, as opposed to school, to adults is quite convenient and meant that attending a lecture was a matter of being online at a certain time or even being able to see the recording later.

Pro says that GDP dropped but GDP is all relative. If the majority of the world has a GDP drop all at once, everybody is going through a bad thing and overall it hasn't really harmed them relative to the rest. GDP being high or low is all relative to other countries, if anything what Covid did to infrastructure and GDP was similar to what it did to education and even hygiene practices; it gave people a reason to improve them. The reason I didn't really build my case on that is that it could be argued this was done in spite of Covid and that Covid just happened to be the agitator but what is irrefutable and what I believe Con will struggle to defeat is that Covid specifically, due to how it altered the world during its time, has pushed forth progress like never before and that indeed includes how teaching is done and jobs and workplaces function. We are a whole decade, minimum, ahead of schedule in terms of being a more cyber-aware and internet-interactive world professionally and academically, due to what lockdowns forced upon us in a way only something like Covid could have done.

Imagine you're a young person living with his family. Life is great, until one day a serial killer comes along and murders all of them except you. You're childhood is full of misery, and so you vow to never let that happen to anyone again. You study hard and become a police officer, charged with stopping serial killers.

----

But does that make you forget your family. Does it give you your family back?

Remote Working

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is not identical across each sector, but almost all industries saw an unprecedented shift in the way they operate. For physical retail and hospitality this meant mass closures and furloughed staff, while for other businesses it meant a spike in remote working as offices were forced to close.

In April, when the first nationwide lockdown was in effect, 46% of the UK workforce did at least some work at home, with 86% doing so as a direct result of the pandemic. The shift away from the office was even more pronounced in the US, with an estimated 56.8% of employed Americans working from home at least some of the time. The “new normal” of work has brought increased flexibility to many jobs but also created new difficulties as traditional avenues for networking and employee onboarding have been restricted.

Some, like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, believe the current state of affairs is an “aberration” that will die out once the pandemic is under control. However, among SMEs there is every indication that the shift to remote working will be permanent. Most firms have seen workplace productivity remain steady or even improve after shifting to a remote working model, and physical offices remain a significant overhead for smaller companies. With some analysts estimating that as much as 70% of the US workforce will be spending time working remotely by 2025, it’s easy to imagine that a good number of firms will seize the opportunity to change their working models for good.

Most firms have seen workplace productivity remain steady or even improve after shifting to a remote working model.

Financial Sector Digitization

Hand in hand with the flight from physical offices, the pandemic has brought the benefits and foibles of digital tools into focus. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the financial services sector; in a single week during March 2020, the use of fintech apps and mobile banking services leapt 72% in Europe. Trading apps gained millions of active users on the back of stock market volatility and stay-at-home orders, sending Robinhood daily trading averages above 4.3 million in June.

In a single week during March 2020, the use of fintech apps and mobile banking services leapt 72% in Europe.

More traditional institutions have been forced to adapt to meet their more tech-savvy challengers as their legacy systems come under increasing strain. For major banks, with profit margins cut drastically by pandemic-induced credit loss provisions, this has meant placing greater focus on improving their online portals and security measures and diverting resources from the high street. HSBC has announced plans to close 82 of its UK branches as a direct consequence of this shift in strategy. Barclays and Lloyds Bank intend to shut down 63 and 56 branches respectively, while the Bank of Ireland aims to close 103 – more than a third of its locations.

Growth of eCommerce

According to a UNCTAD study, both developed and developing nations saw a historic rise in eCommerce sales even as individual customer expenditure fell. US and Canadian eCommerce orders in particular grew 129% year-on-year from April 2019 to April 2020.

This move was hardly unprecedented; the 2003 SARS crisis left a lasting impact on business by launching the growth of Alibaba, JD.com and other Chinese businesses that have since become giants. Indeed, the strongest rises in online shopping during the COVID-19 era were seen in Turkey and China, with Chinese communication platforms WeChat, DingTalk and Tencent Conference benefiting from heightened interest from businesses just as Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams did in western market.

Imagine you're a young person living with his family. Life is great, until one day a serial killer comes along and murders all of them except you. You're childhood is full of misery, and so you vow to never let that happen to anyone again. You study hard and become a police officer, charged with stopping serial killers.

----

But does that make you forget your family. Does it give you your family back?

• The Left Wing in all nations has gained a major argument to defend many poor-helping aspects of its agenda. The Right Wing had also differently gained more legitimate understanding of their battle and perspective.
  
• Vaccine research and technological development is off the charts. Science research changed forever.
  
• The environment was immensely helped by the economy-hindering inactivity that certain industries faced due to lockdowns.
  
• The world had a period of unprecedented peace (other than China with Hong Kong)