Question

what was the change in the system of the Uk from 1940 to 2012? from the economical and political and social side and what is the effect of that now when the country is facing epidemics, such as now, for example.  
I need a detailed answer, please.

Answer 1

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 coronavirus has become a worldwide crisis, behaving like “the once-in-a-century pathogen” (Gates, 2020). Up to 02/03/2020, China has accumulated 80,175 cases and the number outside China is growing rapidly to over 9,000 infected. The situation in Italy and South Korea is almost out of control, while Iran, Japan and other countries are all in danger of facing major outbreaks.

Reflected in the Manhattan Principles on One World One Health (Wildlife Conservation Society, 2004), increasing global linkages lead to the necessity of a Global Medicine (Tirado et al., 2015). SARS, H1N1 influenza and now the Coronavirus, all shown the urgent needs for global collaboration. The world has however, not yet prepared (Gates, 2018) and a global response system is still far away.

Challenges are found not only from technological progress, but also deeply embedded in socially and economically relevant issues. Eichelberger (2007) consider the outbreak of SARS as an example that blames of Chinese culture and people for the disease “resurfaced” in the US. These responses are not free from political concerns. The recent case in China also demonstrate similar responses. People from Wuhan are treated unfairly even if they are not infected, some strong racist attitude against Chinese also was seen in many countries. The social-political side of this worldwide outbreak will surely bring new evidence to the understanding of public behavior and may drive the progress of relevant theories (Raude et al., 2019).

Economically, China is now the second largest economic entity in the world and also the core player in the global economic network. At the same time the virus took thousands of lives, its economic impact to the country is enormous. More importantly, its economic downturns will spillover to other economies and cause broader negative economic shocks. A global economic recession is likely to follow without proper responses. Evidently, the recent crash in all major stock markets is a simply reflection of such network effect.

Many other issues have arisen from the outbreak (Xiang et al., 2020; Vetter et al., 2020), but one enlightening new point is the use of digital technology. Social media, such as WECHAT, has been widely used as a way to communicate, information sharing, administration and supervision in China. Online courses have been developed when universities were kept closing. Companies use video conferences, cloud computing to maintain their daily operation while keeping their employees at home.

Extensive use of digital technology, together with the physical lockdown of cities, has prevented the new coronavirus from spreading and kept China running. A digital lifestyle has surfaced much earlier and wider than expected. Despite the ongoing debates of how digital technology may have adverse effects (Makin, 2018; Haidt and Allen, 2020; Webster et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2019; Blair et al., 2017), it does provide an effective solution in the current scenario, and maybe more. By minimizing travels and avoiding massive festival consumptions, digital lifestyle can also general extra benefits to the environment. It is estimated that around 15% lower global emission is possible due to digital technology (Ekholm and Rockstrom, 2019). Digital technology and big data analytics can also provide new opportunities to cope with the outbreak. Galetsi et al. (2019) perform a systematic review of using big data analytics in healthcare and show clear value of BDA to improve public health and resource allocation. Georgalakis (2020) uses the UCINet (a social network analysis software) information to construct a visualized network for the purpose of understanding the linkage between policy and scientists.

While digital revolution has been found “reshaping” the corporate sector (Elia et al., 2020), creating digital academic entrepreneurship (Rippa and Secundo, 2019), the revolution towards a digital lifestyle and its impacts on the society have yet to be explored. A “digital transformation” of the current world and establishment of the digital culture (Guy, 2019) are something relevant, which requires both empirical and theoretical works in this area.

In light of the aforementioned developments and significance of the outbreak, we propose to organize a special issue in TFSC. The objective is to bring together specialists from different disciplines and all over the world, to setup a platform for scholars to share their views, discuss relevant issues and promote policy oriented researches. Contributions use both quantitative and qualitative based methods are welcomed.