From Argentina to Panama, a number of officials have been forced to resign as reports of fraudulent purchases of ventilators, masks and other medical supplies pile up. The thefts are driven by price-gouging from manufacturers and profiteering by politically connected middlemen who see the crisis as an opportunity for graft.

The current pandemic is giving humanity a crash course in apocalypse management. Whether COVID-19 is actually apocalyptic or not is debatable, but the pandemic has many of the characteristics that we associate with something of that scale. Like climate disruption, it’s global; like nuclear war, it’s deadly. Most importantly, like any crisis of this magnitude, it cannot be solved by a single country or region alone, no matter how powerful.

All eyes are on the corona crisis, and whether Xi Jinping’s China and Donald Trump’s America can join forces in a multilateral strategy to find scientific solutions to it and cooperative economic policies to combat a global depression. But climate change remains the greater long-term threat to humankind.

Over the last two years, you have undoubtedly been bombarded with notifications and pop-ups regarding your personal data every time you click on a website, and since the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, we’ve spent a lot more time thinking about who we grant access to our data, and whether it’s used responsibly, aligned to our consent. These pop-ups are often irritating when scrolling through the Internet and shopping, something that has no doubt been exacerbated under lockdown conditions for all of us.

The World Health Assembly is not normally the focus of worldwide attention. But this year’s session, bringing together all the member states of the World Health Organisation, came during the most serious global pandemic for a century, and at a time of intense political sparring over the origins and course of the disease. Under these circumstances, the assembly turned into a forum for geopolitical manoeuvring between China and the US and highlighted the obstacles to a coordinated global response to the covid-19 crisis.

In mere months coronavirus has changed everything. Authorities across the world are grappling with its implications for public life, scientists are struggling to understand and counter it, and frontline workers are forced to risk their lives in the process; however, amid this exceptional pressure, another, more technical issue is focusing minds: the development and deployment of contract-tracing apps to monitor and contain the spread of the virus by registering public interactions.

One year ago Volodymyr Zelenskiy became President of Ukraine, following a landslide victory. Fed up with corrupt political elites, Ukrainians were hungry for new faces. Zelenskiy fitted the bill.

The recent ruling of the German federal constitutional court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) with regard to asset purchases by the European Central Bank (ECB) has stunned even seasoned observers of European affairs, prompting accusations of the Court going rogue and declaring war on the supranational central bank and the wider European project.

The coronavirus epidemic ranks alongside the rise of terrorism in the 1970s as the worst tragedy that the Italian Republic has ever had to face. In their effort to overcome these tragedies, the Italian people have shown courage, a commendable spirit of sacrifice, and a sense of discipline. The country’s institutions and society have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of very difficult circumstances.

It is far too soon to judge how COVID-19 will transform the EU – we are still in the early phases of a story that will last for several years. But one can tentatively say that six trends which emerged before the virus struck are now accelerating: greater economic autarky, a bigger role for national capitals, a strengthening of borders, a backlash against green policies and widening of both east-west and north-south divisions within the EU. In various ways all these trends are likely to help the cause of anti-EU populists.