A balance sheet of a year of neoliberal pandemic responses A balance sheet of a year of neoliberal pandemic responses On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that Covid-19 was a global pandemic. A year since, there have been more than 116.5 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 globally, including an almost 2.6 million deaths reported to the WHO. Here in the UK, government figures show that the virus has claimed nearly 125,000 lives. The death toll continues to rise as the virus continues to be unchecked. The pandemic has exposed massive and multiple weaknesses and failures of the corporate and finance capital-dominated, globalised world we live in. The failures in governance are at the national, regional and global levels. In addition to the obviously vastly difficult nature of the situation, these failings can be attributed to a mixture of incompetence, blind obedience to market-oriented approaches, lack of planning capacity, corruption, and at times sheer negligence and lack of political will.