What would we have paid to avoid this latest coronavirus outbreak?

COVID-19 first spread to humans in a wet market in Wuhan, China. From there, it has infected people in more than 75 countries, killing more than 3,000. Both numbers will continue to grow. It also wiped $3 trillion USD from international markets in the single biggest loss since 2008. From food shopping to lives lost and talks of a global recession in just eight weeks.

It might seem crass to talk money, but all of it—the human death toll, the economic hit, the knee-jerk racist reactions—could have been avoided for about $5 trillion. That’s the price tag to fund the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for one year.

It’s not too late to stave off the next epidemic.

The Sustainable Development Goals are a roadmap, 17 targets meant to mobilize funding and resources to end poverty, achieve food security and promote health. They’ve never been adequately funded.

This is a problem in the age of global viral outbreaks. Pandemics, by and large, are diseases of deprivation. Pathogens breed in wild animal populations and jump to humans in places where the two come into frequent contact without regulation. From there, they spread through dense populations and weak health systems. That’s why the World Health Organization and funders like Bill Gates are urging wealthy nations to help build primary health systems in low and middle-income countries.

For years, the international community has been lining up to cut foreign aid, Canadian politicians of all stripes included. I’ve made moral and political arguments against this before but spending tends to get more attention. So I’ll talk economics.

The world economy is in survival mode. Though stocks aren’t equivalent to paper money, what happens in the markets affects banks and businesses, trickling down to retirement savings and small business loans. Meanwhile, schools are closed in 22 countries, affecting 300 million students. Travel is disrupted, events cancelled and supply chains suspended.

Foreign aid is an easy line item to cut with the rationale that resources should first be deployed in our own backyard. Coronavirus has revealed the miscalculation behind this thinking. Diseases don’t care about national borders and that means that poverty around the world is our concern here, too. In this instance, the moral and economic choice are the same.

Before COVID-19 there was Ebola, Zika, H1N1, MERS and SARS. After, there will be another global health emergency, likely originating in a low-income country, and with it, another economic downturn. But we can insulate ourselves from the worst effects. The Sustainable Development Goals will bolster primary healthcare, most notably with outbreak surveillance systems, the likes of which were called for in the aftermath of the 2014 Ebola epidemic.

How much would we have paid to avoid this coronavirus, to have kept thousands of people alive and healthy?

Five trillion dollars is a lot of money. But then tally up the final cost of this health crisis with the last one and the next one. Preventing the next pandemic is money well spent, not to avoid stock market crashes, but to keep marginalized people healthy. We’re only as strong as our most vulnerable.