Anyone assessing the attention, column inches and buzz dedicated to our latest international digital edition must find it difficult to believe that we have been around for only a week.

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams ... What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.”

In an editorial in these pages three years ago, Arab News welcomed the appointment of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a vote of confidence in Saudi Arabia’s younger generation, and we predicted that rapid and far-reaching reform would penetrate every corner of the Kingdom.

The most powerful weapons of mass destruction, the most terrible natural disasters, and the most vicious terrorist attacks have all failed to inflict upon 21st-century humanity the destruction caused by a single, tiny virus.