The COVID-19 Pandemic hen we last spoke with you in April 2021, we discussed governments’ COVID-19 response measures. As the current health crisis is slowly receding, what plans have you seen the international community adopting to handle future pandemics? To reiterate from our past conversation, world governments have all taken drastic measures which had hitherto been unprecedented, not only to contain pandemic but also to support the economy. For the first time in the history of the modern world, public debt and the convergence criteria were no longer a variable in the equation that had to be taken into consideration. The dogma of the public deficit has been temporarily set aside, sacrificed on the altar of protecting populations. In a sort of general alignment, W 14 MAY 2022 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM by the state of Hong Kong where families are sometimes separated in prefabs. It is to be feared that the sacrifice of the public deficit on the altar of health preservation risks mutating into a sacrifice of individual freedoms on that of prevention. To bring it down to a smaller scale, what should individual (large) businesses be focusing on as we emerge from the pandemic? Having witnessed one global ‘black swan event’, how would you advise senior management to safeguard their assets in preparation for another? It is important to remember what the “black swan” theory is. The black swan theory, developed by statistician Nassim Taleb, notably in his essay ‘The Black Swan: The Power of the Unpredictable’, is a theory according to which a black swan is a certain unpredictable event that has a low probability of occurring and which, if it occurs, has far-reaching and exceptional consequences. Taleb describes the black governments have succeeded in overcoming tension or enmity to succeed in conducting a policy of general interest. It was quite fascinating to witness this near unison. It must be kept in mind that with the pandemic being global, no one could afford the luxury of placing political or diplomatic ideology ahead of public health. In France alone, the COVID debt is more than €600 billion. Colossal. I have just returned from Mauritius where our Group has opened a strategic centre supervising our interventions on the African continent. The local population salutes the decision-making of Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth, his responsiveness and the ties he has been able to strengthen with friendly countries for the purpose of serving the local population. His attitude made it possible to convince even part of the population among whom the protest was mounting after the legislative elections of 2019. However, the fear of reviving a global COVID wave as we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic is leading some governments to take measures that can be described as excessive. I am thinking in particular of the preventive confinement of part of the Chinese province or the isolation measures taken
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