Mr Harari, a historian and the author of the international best-seller Sapiens, warned strong lockdown measures will hit the global economy as he urged international solidarity and sharing of scientific information. He said in an op-ed piece published in French daily Le Monde: “If [strict] lockdown measures are, in the short term, needed to stop the spread of the epidemic; isolationism, in the long term, will trigger a collapse of the global economy. On the contrary. The true antidote to the epidemic is not isolationism, but cooperation.