Coming a distant second in the national consciousness is the tragedy unfolding in the UK, the US, Italy and Spain, as coronavirus tests leaders such as Donald Trump, and Boris Johnson, and finds them wanting.

Australians are also closely monitoring what is happening in the developed economies of Asia - nations such as China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan - and drawing lessons from their experience.

But how much thought are we giving to the third and fourth worlds which will be disproportionately affected - as is already the case with HIV-AIDS and global heating - by a crisis they did not create and do not have the resources to fight?

Large parts of Africa, for example, are little better prepared to meet this crisis than Europe was for the Black Death 1000 years ago.

A tragedy on an epic scale is already unfolding on our doorstep in Indonesia.

If the virus gets a foothold in Papua New Guinea it could bring about a collapse in law and order and other services.

High rates of poverty, poor nutrition, threadbare health services and pre-existing health problems, such as tuberculosis, mean the country of eight million is highly vulnerable to the disease.

There are only about a dozen ventilators in Port Moresby and only a couple in other parts of the country.

More than 60 per cent of people lack access to safe water and just two per cent have somewhere in, or near, their home where they can wash their hands.

India is trying to forestall a catastrophe that could claim hundreds of thousands of lives.

It is trying to lockdown more than one billion people; an initiative many fear is doomed to failure.

Iran is still struggling to bring one of the world's largest outbreaks under control. Millions of refugees from the war in Syria are jammed into refugee camps on the Turkish border. A humanitarian catastrophe on an unprecedented scale seems inevitable.

And, in Syria itself, in the midst of all of this, the fighting continues to escalate.

Meanwhile the developed world has, albeit predictably, drawn its wagons into a circle and, in the parlance of the times, "hunkered down" to ride this out.

It is, as Andrew Forrest found when he battled Americans to source PPE in China, a case of every nation for itself.

As a result billions of the world's poorest and most disadvantaged people are being left to fend for themselves.

They will, if anything, be used by the more fortunate west, as test cases to ascertain how COVID-19 moves through a population when social isolation and other public health measures can't be put in place or enforced.

While it is effectively impossible to provide direct assistance on a global scale right now, we need to recognise that when this over for us many of the poorest nations will still be in a very bad way.

Governments may fall. Health and judicial systems will almost certainly collapse. Education and other services will be a distant memory.

Once the developed nations are on top of this in their own countries they will have an obligation to mount what will surely be the largest international aid effort in history.

If, as the world's leaders keep on saying, we are "all in this together", they - and we - have to care about everybody on the planet. Each life matters.

A nation's affluence makes it fortunate; it doesn't make it, or its people, special. Only their actions will do that.