IMF deputy says world needs to prepare for Covid downsides

Bloomberg

The world needs to be preparing for downside scenarios relating to Covid-19, the deputy chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said, calling for billions of dollars in grants to bolster pandemic preparedness.
“What I’m worried about is that everybody’s hoping for the best-case scenario, which is that this is a mild, endemic virus — but what experts tell us is that we could have much worse downside scenarios, and we need to prepare for that and that’s part where I think more needs to be done,” IMF First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath said in an interview with Lisa Abramowicz and Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television on Thursday.
Gopinath repeated the fund’s call earlier this month for additional funding to fight pandemics and to strengthen health systems, saying this would require about $15 billion in grants this year and $10 billion annually after that.
The IMF is in process of updating global economic-growth forecasts, and is set to publish results in its World Economic Outlook scheduled for April 19 during its spring meetings in Washington. The fund in January said the global economy would expand 4.4% this year, down from an estimate of 4.9% in October.
“What is true is that we will have a significant downgrade to our growth projection,” Gopinath said, citing the effects of hot inflation, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as reasons for the cut.”
“We will remain in positive territory for global growth. That said, we are in very, very difficult times — the pandemic is not over.”