On 31 December 2019, an email was sent by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control to the World Health Organization (WHO). The Taiwanese had learned from online sources that there had been at least seven cases of “atypical pneumonia” in Wuhan, China; they were alerting the WHO to that effect while also requesting further information.

In China, the term “atypical pneumonia” is commonly used to refer to SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), a disease with human-to-human transmission caused by coronavirus. Hence the message suggested the Taiwanese authorities were suspecting an outbreak and were particularly worried in light of the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday and associated travel. They also contacted the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention for more information.

The response from both the WHO and from the relevant Chinese authorities was procedural but ultimately underwhelming. The WHO triggered its incident management mechanism and began assessment of the situation, including through meeting with reluctant Chinese officials in Beijing to gather more information, and through issuing technical guidance to its member states. But by the time the WHO declared from its Geneva HQ the novel coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, a number of countries in the Pacific region had already reported multiple cases and confirmed humanto- human transmission, while undoubtedly the disease had spread far beyond. The rest is history.

This email exchange highlights in a stark and succinct way the quandary of collective action to preserve the global commons in the twenty-first century – in this case averting a health pandemic. A venerable mission-specific global institution entrusted with world health, faced with limits to its remit and its power and – most importantly – encountering national political reticence for acknowledging the gravity of the situation and taking rapid decisions, is no match for a fast-transmitting but predictable (and indeed previously predicted) virus.

There had been no shortage of advance warnings. Since 2000 at least, increasingly frequent outbreaks of infectious diseases, some of which frightened global public opinion, had led the WHO to strengthen its procedures and give itself new legal powers. And yet, when the pandemic broke out, the existing global governance framework failed spectacularly.