to do better the next time, and there will be a next time there is a pandemic. i think that is not a person on the planet who has experienced the last two years and would disagree with that, but where it starts to become tricky is what goes in that international agreement? will it be a convention, will it be a treaty, will it be legally binding? will it get the who more powers to fly it scientists into a country where there is a new virus emerging? even if the government of that country doesn t want it, will it force pharmaceutical companies to waive their patents when there is a global health crisis? so, we are looking at at least two years, i think, for a first draught of this treaty to be presented to member states of the who. and we know already that there are different viewpoints about how firm it should be and certainly how much power the who should have. so i think it s going to be very interesting in two years.
industry, they have been cautiously easing restrictions, like mandatory quarantine, just over the past two months. now a new and highly infectious variant is spreading, confronting governments here with a dilemma in tourist dependent places like bali, businesses there are warning of dire economic consequences if leisure travel doesn t resume soon. yet, if there are severe new outbreaks under this omicron variant, that could force governments to put their societies back into complete shutdowns and devastating the rest of their economies to it. forthe moment, most of the governments have responded by imposing bans on some african and european countries where the new variant has already been detected. onlyjapan has imposed a ban on all foreign arrivals. governments here cannot forget that even when they did cut themselves off from the rest of the world and sealed their borders off at huge economic cost, while they