Dossier Coronavirus
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The staggering rate of coronavirus infections in Spain — where nearly 5,000 people have died since the start of the outbreak — has trained a spotlight on a health care system left badly wounded after years of austerity.
Like elsewhere in Europe, the crisis situation has forced hospitals and doctors to reach to extremes to cope with the surge of critically ill patients: Hospitals have called retired doctors under 70 to the front lines and recruited medical students to do administrative work; in Madrid, a massive conference center has become the country’s largest hospital and an ice rink has been repurposed as a morgue.
As politicians of all stripes line up to heap praise on the efforts and sacrifices being made by Spanish health workers, many argue that the excessive pressure on hospitals is at least partly a result of painful austerity measures that have left the country ill-equipped to deal with an epidemic.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez calls coronavirus a war that “the Spanish people” must fight together, but in such a decentralized country it’s proving a challenge to coordinate a common response from 17 autonomous regions with their own health systems.
With the death toll rising at a terrifying rate and Spain set to replace Italy as Europe’s virus hot spot, Sánchez’s precarious leftist coalition has faced resistance from regional leaders, some of whom see his declaration of a state of emergency as a power grab.
He has imposed a strict lockdown, pushed through economic measures worth 20 percent of Spain’s output, and introduced regular videoconferences with four key ministers and the presidents of the autonomous regions in a bid to improve coordination.
But in contrast to another decentralized European country with devolved powers in areas like health — Germany — some regions question the national leader’s authority to a degree that Chancellor Angela Merkel never faces from the 16 German Länder.
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In the EU, national governments have long opposed letting Brussels play a greater role in health policy. Health raises sensitive issues and there’s a lot of money in health care and the management of public health; this is political capital politicians are loathe to give up.
The coronavirus outbreak may — and should — change this calculus.
To combat the kind of threat we’re facing today, we need to allow the EU to play the role it is primed to perform — particularly when it comes to the procurement and distribution of medical countermeasures such as vaccines, antivirals, respirators or protective gear.
The summit was virtual; the anger and disagreement among EU leaders was very real.
For Italy, the test of EU solidarity in responding to the coronavirus crisis came down to a simple point: Your bond is your word.
But EU heads of state and government failed Rome’s test during a videoconference on Thursday by refusing to back the idea of “corona bonds” — a common debt instrument to help finance the response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed thousands of lives across Europe in recent weeks and put the Continent on virtual lockdown.
The dispute took EU leaders to the edge of a political debacle, with a complete breakdown averted only through an agreement brokered by European Council President Charles Michel for leaders to return to the debate in two weeks, when they will consider formal proposals from eurozone finance ministers.
I have always considered myself a proud European, today more than ever. Nevertheless, the current mood between the heads of State and Government, coupled with the persistent viral divisions, presents a lethal risk – not only to the European Union, but also to our ability to bounce back from this unprecedented systemic and symmetric crisis.
Why are we unwilling to understand what the facts and figures on the high level of deaths and suffering are telling us? Why are we not able to grasp what is now known by everyone on the incoming recession in Europe, which will likely be close to 10% loss in GDP?
No one can predict when we will be able to get out of this acute period of the pandemic; nor do we know the exact timetable and the final actual costs for organising the recovery and relaunch of our economies.
The jobs and livelihoods of millions of Europeans are at stake. Large companies have ample buffers and credit lines, but people on a modest salary, the self-employed or small company owners are at risk. The repercussions of bungling our response will be dire.
To avoid the worst, Europe has to learn from its past mistakes and act quickly, decisively and with a sense of solidarity. Only by sharing the burden of this challenge do we have a chance of succeeding.
Yes, our national social security mechanisms and government emergency measures will absorb some of the blow. But if we want to prevent this from turning into a new sovereign debt crisis like the one we saw in 2012 — and from which we’ve only barely recovered — we’ll have to come up with a common European approach.
We keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political argument. The prime minister goes on TVto issue a sombre statement to the nation about the curtailment of our liberties and the leader of the opposition offers nothing but support. Parliament, insofar as it is able to operate at all, appears to be merely going through the motions. People are stuck at home, and their fights are limited to the domestic sphere. There is talk of a government of national unity. Politics-as-usual has gone missing.
But this is not the suspension of politics. It is the stripping away of one layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath. In a democracy we tend to think of politics as a contest between different parties for our support. We focus on the who and the what of political life: who is after our votes, what they are offering us, who stands to benefit. We see elections as the way to settle these arguments. But the bigger questions in any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when they do?
Having been quarantined at his parents’ house in the Hebei province in northern China for a month, Elvis Liu arrived back home in Hong Kong on February 23rd. Border officials told him to add their office’s number to his WhatsApp contacts and to fix the app’s location-sharing setting to “always on”, which would let them see where his phone was at all times. They then told him to get home within two hours, close the door and stay there for two weeks.
His next fortnight was punctuated, every eight hours, with the need to reactivate that always-on location sharing; Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, requires such affirmation so people do not just default to being tracked. Compared with his first lockdown—in a spacious apartment, with family and dogs for company—the ten-square-metre flat with two tiny courtyard-facing windows was grim. When he emerged, on March 8th, he immediately donned mask, goggles and gloves and took a ferry to the island of Lamma where he galloped down lush forest trails for 30km, high on freedom, injuring his knees in the process. He still has trouble sleeping. But he is fit to work, and Hong Kong is content that he poses no risk to the health of his fellow citizens.
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Probably for most of us, the coronavirus crisis will soon enough — Six months? A year? — recede in our minds and come to seem like a hallucinatory moment. Maybe it will be like a hurricane that forced everyone to rush inland and then only glanced the coast.
Or maybe it will be like a hurricane that really does hit. Even then, human nature being what it is, most people will clean up and move on.
Yet no matter how the coronavirus pandemic passes, or how quickly, there is likely in these strange housebound weeks a new political epoch being born.
There are two large reasons to believe the political echo of this crisis will last much longer than the crisis itself.
The first is that many of the people whose expectations and routines are most dramatically upended by the pandemic are students. The interruption, and in some cases irreplaceable loss, of important experiences in their education, as campuses empty and untold events are canceled, will likely shape their consciousness in more lasting ways than for the rest of us.
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The new coronavirus is causing havoc in rich countries. Often overlooked is the damage it will cause in poor ones, which could be even worse. Official data do not begin to tell the story. As of March 25th Africa had reported only 2,800 infections so far; India, only 650. But the virus is in nearly every country and will surely spread. There is no vaccine. There is no cure. A very rough guess is that, without a campaign of social distancing, between 25% and 80% of a typical population will be infected. Of these, perhaps 4.4% will be seriously sick and a third of those will need intensive care. For poor places, this implies calamity.
Social distancing is practically impossible if you live in a crowded slum. Hand-washing is hard if you have no running water (see article). Governments may tell people not to go out to work, but if that means their families will not eat, they will go out anyway. If prevented, they may riot.
So covid-19 could soon be all over poor countries. And their health-care systems are in no position to cope. Many cannot deal with the infectious diseases they already know, let alone a new and highly contagious one. Health spending per head in Pakistan is one two-hundredth the level in America. Uganda has more government ministers than intensive-care beds. Throughout history, the poor have been hardest-hit by pandemics. Most people who die of aids are African. The Spanish flu wiped out 6% of India’s entire population.
In just a few weeks a virus a ten-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter has transformed Western democracies. States have shut down businesses and sealed people indoors. They have promised trillions of dollars to keep the economy on life support. If South Korea and Singapore are a guide, medical and electronic privacy are about to be cast aside. It is the most dramatic extension of state power since the second world war.
One taboo after another has been broken. Not just in the threat of fines or prison for ordinary people doing ordinary things, but also in the size and scope of the government’s role in the economy. In America Congress is poised to pass a package worth almost $2trn, 10% of gdp, twice what was promised in 2007-09. Credit guarantees by Britain, France and other countries are worth 15% of gdp. Central banks are printing money and using it to buy assets they used to spurn. For a while, at least, governments are seeking to ban bankruptcy.
The COVID-19 crisis has ravaged many countries across the globe—and it has also presented an opportunity for extremist groups across the ideological spectrum to spread hate. As is often the case in times of uncertainty, extremists and terrorists have jumped at the chance to exploit confusion and fear, reach new audiences, and serve their own interests.
This is worrying for several reasons. In 2014, when the academic community was studying the effects of Islamic State propaganda on people’s willingness to travel abroad and join the conflict in Iraq and Syria, it was clear that the appeal of recruiters lay in a target audience’s need to understand their place in the world. As more information became available on those who joined terrorist organizations, or even those who committed terrorist attacks in their own countries, a common theme was the need to belong to an “insider” community and commit violence or destroy the ways of life of those who were part of the “outsider” community.
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When the novel coronavirus first emerged in China’s Hubei Province, foreign reactions to the country’s handling of the epidemic swung between extremes. At a press conference held in Beijing in late February, Bruce Aylward, who co-led the World Health Organization’s (WHO) joint mission with China on the disease now known as COVID-19, praised what he described as “probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease-containment effort in history.” Pointing to a graph that showed a steep decline in cases, he commented, “If I had COVID-19, I’d want to be treated in China.”
Others have been far more critical. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College, suggested that China’s “less than impressive” management of the crisis would reinforce “a trend for global companies to ‘de-Sinicize’ their supply chains.” The use of the term “sick man of Asia” in the headline caused particular umbrage and provided a pretext for the expulsion of three Wall Street Journal reporters from China. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang condemned the use of “racially discriminatory language,” to which U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded with a defense of the free press.
To fight a pandemic, governments are erecting barriers to the movement of people and goods unlike anything seen since the end of World War II. In some ways, the new barriers are even tighter. America’s borders with Canada and Mexico remained open during the war, but they are closed now.
These interventions have been introduced as temporary measures. Globalization is suspended only for the duration, governments insist. But if we are not very careful now, during the crisis, the duration will extend itself indefinitely.
In the crisis, even the ideal of global cooperation is dying. The Trump administration did not consult with European allies—if allies remains the right word—before effectively suspending transatlantic air travel. The German government accused the Trump administration of trying to gain exclusive rights to Germany’s vaccine research, again without consultation. France and Germany forbade the export of protective medical gear to Italy. Hungary and Poland unilaterally closed their borders.
The world-renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz has rightly called our attention to the dramatic threats the coronavirus poses to everyone’s health and to the economy and society at large. He urges us to appreciate once more the important role of government, public policy and public values, as the antidote to what Ulrich Beck long ago defined as ‘risk society’—the society of side-effects.
From a different perspective, but similar approach, the eloquent feminist social scientist Nancy Fraser highlights in her 2017 book Social Reproduction Theory how creating and maintaining social bonds is essential to guaranteeing ‘sustainability’ in society. Fraser’s focus is on caring, which provides ties between generations, as well as within and across communities. But this is threatened, she argues, by the withdrawal of public support under neoliberal, financialised capitalism.
From Madrid to Paris, Berlin to Warsaw, the nation-state seems to be experiencing a striking renaissance. Borders are back, and with them national selfishness. Each national government is focusing on its own people, and each claims to be better prepared to fight the crisis than its neighbours.
Virtually overnight, national capitals have effectively reclaimed sovereignty from the European Union without asking either their own people or Brussels for permission. They are practically ruling by decree in a war-style fashion. We are at war, declared the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and he sent armed units on to the streets to police the draconian orders. Other leaders have more or less followed suit.
The coronavirus outbreak seems to be reversing the course of history. Gone is globalisation and European integration. Back is the heroic struggle of states for national survival.
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EU countries are reverting to a familiar mantra in times of crisis: Buy local!
Some countries have betrayed a shaky sense of European solidarity in the early days of the coronavirus crisis, and a half-hearted commitment to the internal market. Borders have shut, countries have been reluctant to export medical equipment and northern countries have shot down the idea of a pan-European debt instrument dubbed “corona bonds.”
This week, France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire stoked further suspicions that charity really begins at home in the EU by calling on retailers to be “economically patriotic” and favor products from French farmers.
“I call on major distributors to make a new effort: Stock up on French products,” he said on France Info radio.
Le Maire’s call came after Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced on Monday evening that open-air food markets would be closed. Almost simultaneously, Agriculture Minister Didier Guillaume encouraged citizens “to make a gesture of alimentary patriotism” and “buy French” in an interview with BFM TV.
The global impact of the coronavirus pandemic poses a fundamental question: is this one of those historic moments when the world changes permanently, when the balance of political and economic power shifts decisively, and when, for most people, in most countries, life is never quite the same again?
Put more simply, is this the end of the world as we know it? And, equally, could the crisis mark a new beginning?
Genuinely pivotal global moments, watersheds or turning points (pick your own terminology) are actually quite rare. Yet if the premise is correct – that there can be no return to the pre-Covid-19 era – then it poses many unsettling questions about the nature of the change, and whether it will be for better or worse.
For countless individuals and families, normal life has already been upended in previously unimaginable ways. But how will the pandemic influence the future behaviour of nation states, governments and leaders – and their often dysfunctional relationships? Will they work together more closely, or will this shared trauma further divide them?
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Camus would probably have welcomed the moral choices made by most of the country in this pandemic. This might seem an odd judgment in light of the outcry about people acting selfishly, from supermarket hoarders to seaside revellers.
Yet, given the degree to which our lives have been turned upside down, the extent to which we’ve had to curb our usual behaviours, and the swiftness with which the changes have been imposed, what is extraordinary is not that some people are flouting the new social norms but that the vast majority comply with them so willingly and completely.
On March 24, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a complete nationwide lockdown for 21 days—one of the strongest national measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The decision marked a sharp turn. Just a week ago, the world’s second-most populous country was being seen as a mysterious anomaly that had remained relatively unscathed from the deadly pandemic. But then the math caught up. As the lockdown began, the number of confirmed cases in the country was beginning to grow exponentially, rising to 933 by March 28.
While New Delhi has taken decisive action, there are fears it has come too late and that too many of the country’s poor and homeless will be left exposed. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, a pandemic as long ago as March 11. Back then, India refused to label it a health emergency, and large parts of the country continued about business as usual. Even now, the entire country has tested fewer than 30,000 people, representing one of the lowest testing rates in the world.
The United Nations Security Council is watching the greatest global health crisis in a century unfold from the sidelines, quarreling over the wisdom of working online, batting down proposals to help organize the response to the pandemic, and largely ignoring the U.N. secretary-general’s appeal for a global cease-fire.
The paralysis comes at a time when the United States is pressing the 15-nation council to adopt a resolution that would largely blame China for unleashing the pathogen on the world. The initiative—which appears to be part of a broader U.S. strategy to deflect responsibility for its own sluggish response to the spread of the virus—is certain to be blocked by China, which wields veto power.
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To borrow and paraphrase Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous quote about prisons, you can tell a lot about a society by its response to epidemics of infectious disease.
Plagues put a mirror to the societies they afflict.
A pandemic will expose the failures of a government that does not invest in the health of its constituents or address the collective risks that arise when vulnerable groups lack health protections. For such a society, taking those lessons and applying them to reduce the risks of future contagion is surely the better of two possible outcomes.
In 2009, as the economy struggled to rebound from the Great Recession, executives at the New York Times found themselves in a vigorous internal debate. They were trying to decide whether their content should go behind a paywall, making it available only to paying subscribers. There were compelling arguments on both sides. It wasn’t at all clear that people would be willing to pay for news; by implementing a paywall, the Times risked cannibalizing its enormous digital audience. But advertising revenue was plummeting, both online and in print, and the newspaper desperately needed new sources of income. To study the matter, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher at the time, convened internal committees and hired outside consultants. The Times’s leadership, meanwhile, took drastic steps to stabilize the company financially, borrowing two hundred and fifty million dollars from the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, trimming the size of the newsroom, and reducing a dividend paid to members of the Sulzberger family. In a final meeting of newsroom and business-department leaders, both sides presented their cases. Sulzberger cast his lot with those who favored charging for digital access.
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In the desperate fight against the novel coronavirus, social media platforms have achieved an important victory: they have helped limit the dissemination of life-threatening misinformation that could worsen the pandemic. But this success should not cause us to adopt a similar approach to political speech, where greater caution is required.
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have each moved quickly to remove coronavirus misinformation that encourages people to take actions that could put them at risk. Google is privileging information from official health agencies, such as the World Health Organization, and has established a 24-hour incident-response team that removes misinformation from search results and YouTube. Facebook’s WhatsApp has teamed up with the WHO to provide a messaging service that offers real-time updates.
If this is the worst of times, it is also the best of times. In our anxiety we are drawing deep reserves of strength from others. In our isolation we are rediscovering community. In our confusion we are rethinking whom we trust. In our fragmentation we are rediscovering the value of institutions.
To each their own narrative or metaphor. If this feels like the blitz spirit to you, all well and good. Others find it helps to imagine a world recast through virtual networks.
But what it amounts to is this: there is such a thing as society and we are all interdependent. And if it sometimes takes a grave crisis to remind ourselves of these truths, then this moment may well be historic for the possibilities of hope as well as for all the tragedy and turmoil.
Nearly 200 years ago, the French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the power we have been re-experiencing over the past few weeks: “In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.”
An old adage has it that crises don’t make a person, but rather reveal what s/he is made of. The same applies to political systems: during times of crisis, their underlying strengths and weaknesses are laid bare. When the coronavirus crisis began, there was much discussion of how it revealed the underlying weaknesses of Chinese authoritarianism.
Faulty bottom-up and top-down information flows in China hindered an early understanding of the nature and depth of the crisis. Local officials in Wuhan prioritised maintaining favour with party elites over protecting the health and wellbeing of their citizens, contributing to cover-ups which sent the catastrophe ‘careening outward’. The Beijing regime’s bureaucratic nature and reliance on ‘performance legitimacy’—in return for giving up their freedom, citizens are promised effective government—created incentives for it to suppress, rather than deal openly with, bad news and difficult challenges.
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The surreal atmosphere of the Covid-19 pandemic calls to mind how I felt as a young man in the 84th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge. Now, as in late 1944, there is a sense of inchoate danger, aimed not at any particular person, but striking randomly and with devastation. But there is an important difference between that faraway time and ours. American endurance then was fortified by an ultimate national purpose. Now, in a divided country, efficient and farsighted government is necessary to overcome obstacles unprecedented in magnitude and global scope. Sustaining the public trust is crucial to social (…)
