Month: April 2020

The Triumph of Death by artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, circa 1562.

Lessons to draw from Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’

The Triumph of Death by artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, circa 1562.   Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year offers important lessons amid our COVID-19 pandemic. Here are nine lessons that we can pick.   A dreadful plague in London was In the year sixty-five, Which swept an hundred

Book Review: ‘The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History’

  The lowest estimate of the pandemic’s worldwide death toll is twenty one million, in a world with a population less than one-third today’s. That estimate comes from a contemporary study of the disease and newspapers have often cited it since, but it is almost certainly wrong. Epidemiologists today estimate

Legislative Responses to COVID-19: Parliament of Ghana

  In response to COVID-19, the Parliament of Ghana enacted the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) National Trust Fund Act, 2020 on Thursday, April 2, 2020. It was assented to by  President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on April 3, 2020. According to the sponsor of the legislation: The object of the Bill

COVID-19: What Parliamentarians around the World have said

Yesterday, I issued the epidemic notice, and today the Minister of Civil Defence declared a state of national emergency, both of which provide us the powers for Government to move the country to level 4. This is the second time in New Zealand’s history that a state of national emergency