I'm happy to take an initial attempt at it.
I think that is a real risk. One of the things that has been really striking so far about this crisis, in contrast to, say, the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak, is just the lack of a sense of a common global effort. I put some of that, frankly, to my own country. I think there's been a lot of insularity in the way the U.S. government has handled this. Usually, you'd look to the U.S. government to be trying to lead and convene those kinds of global efforts and we haven't seen that. That's reflective of some broader trends in the world, but it's really unfortunate and, as you said, very rare.
We're all facing a common enemy here, so we do need a more common approach. We're not going to be able to defeat this or be truly safe from this anywhere until it is controlled everywhere.
I think it ties back to the previous question on a travel ban. One of the concerns about travel bans is that, as all of the literature on travel bans suggests, at best they buy you two to four weeks of time to prep. They do not buy you enduring protection. They will delay, potentially, the arrival of an outbreak in a country, but they do not prevent it. Unless you're New Zealand or Fiji, they're not going to prevent it.
The utility of a travel ban, if there is such, is to slightly delay the arrival of the outbreak so that you can prepare, but it still will arrive. I think we're at a point now where this is in every country in the world. For a country like Canada or the U.S., or any country, we're not going to be able to rely on travel controls to keep us safe. We need to suppress it at home and we need to simultaneously work on suppressing it overseas because as long as those...
Every country is going to have a lot of dry kindling until we get a vaccine. As long as there are sparks flying from anywhere in the world, there's a chance that that dry kindling will get hit again. That's what South Korea and China have experienced as well. The greatest threat—maybe not the greatest threat but a significant threat—for them since they got it back under control has been the reintroduction of travel.
I think we're right. If we want to be able to get the economy back on track, we have to be able to get global travel back on track. About 10% of global GDP depends on travel or tourism. That's a big hit. That's a really big hit if we have to sustain two to three years before there's a vaccine widely available, with huge damage to global travel. The best way to do that is to suppress it everywhere and that has to be a global effort. That's not something that countries can just do individually.