COVID-19 and Public Policy in the Digital Age

Andrea Monti, Raymond Wacks

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367553456
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000326963
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Epidemiology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

COVID-19 and Public Policy in the Digital Age explores how states and societies have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and their long-term implications for public policy and the rule of law globally. It examines the extent to which existing methods of protecting public safety and national security measure up in a time of crisis. The volume also examines how these ideas themselves have undergone transformation in the context of the global crisis.

This book:

• Explores the intersection of public policy, individual rights, and technology;
• Analyzes the role of science in determining political choices;
• Reconsiders our understanding of security studies on a global scale arising out of antisocial behaviour, panic buying, and stockpiling of food and (in the United States) arms;
• Probes the role of fake news and social media in crisis situations; and
• Provides a critical analysis of the notion of global surveillance in relation to the pandemic.

A timely, prescient volume on the many ramifications of the pandemic, this book will be essential reading for professionals, scholars, researchers, and students of public policy, especially practitioners working in the fields of technology and society, security studies, law, media studies, and public health.

1 Confronting contagion

Memory is an active process. Details have to be rehearsed to be retained, but who wants to rehearse the details of a pandemic? A war has a victor … but a pandemic has only vanquished.

Laura Spinney¹

1 Spinney 2017.

The velocity at which we now live—thanks, in large part, to the Internet—has changed the world forever. We not only communicate and transact business online in the blink of an eye; our very persona is shaped by social media. The almost instantaneous gratification of our needs and expectations has become a helter-skelter from which there is no going back. Fortunes are made or lost in stock market seconds; logistics transport goods across continents in days, if not hours. Even death wields its grim sickle at high speed: remotely controlled weapons and ordnance enable war to be waged swiftly and without the need for the loss of human ‘boots on the ground’. Pace is all. The centrifugal rapidity of life without seat belts is the norm in most of the developed world.

Enter COVID-19. The brakes are suddenly applied. Governments across the globe enforce a lockdown as the response to the crisis, and we are cast into a vortex of fear and uncertainty.

Many of the challenges posed by the virus arise less from the disease than the reactions of policymakers and the fragility of the globalized industrial, economic, and financial infrastructure that, like Atlas, supports the world on its shoulders. The death toll and the stagnation of the economy are plain enough, but the pandemic has generated a range of other harms that are often obscured by the flashing lights of vehicles carrying victims to their fate.

In pursuit of a quick solution—a fundamentally political necessity—there has been a problematic attitude by certain governments toward the rule of law. By curtailing individual liberty in the ostensible defence of public health, they have diluted a number of civil rights. Italy, for instance, has issued a plethora of regulations that raise several basic constitutional questions. Germany, on the other hand, has resisted issuing special regulations, managing to maintain the protection of rights guaranteed in the constitution. The United Kingdom government has encountered some obstacles in the path of the introduction of Draconian measures thanks to the traditional British resilience against inroads into individual freedom. Nor did the United States resort to the President’s executive powers, instead allowing state governors to resolve local problems. India permitted the police to compel compliance by the use of violence. China adopted its normal strategy: either ‘Confucian’ acquiescence or, as a backup, coercion. Japan has relied upon strong individual respect toward a central authority that does not need its power to be asserted. Taiwan and South Korea capitalized on their tragic experience of the outbreak of SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2015 by deploying an impressive technological and organizational response to the virus. Some ‘third world’ countries, Thailand, Vietnam, Senegal, and the Indian state of Kerala, succeeded in containing the virus without the need for digital contact tracing, artificial intelligence, or other advanced software technology.

The irrational, if understandable, fear of the virus engendered a blame game in which the principal target is China, which is accused of a number of transgressions, including covering up the outbreak and its extent, and the use of totalitarian policies to stem the epidemic. But similar objections have also been levelled at Western societies whose governments have been charged with adopting the tactics of a police state or pursuing an anti-scientific public policy approach. These exaggerated claims have not been especially constructive.

Western governments have from time to time adulterated the rule of law. But its status as a defining feature of a democratic society is rarely questioned. Even in the dark days following the 9/11 terrorist outrage or during the ‘war on terror’, or the Syrian and other North Africa and Middle East geopolitical crises its power endured. The present pandemic has, by contrast, produced a disconcerting indifference toward constitutional principles, which have been portrayed as legalistic pedantry that thwarts governments from doing ‘the right thing’. As a consequence, the watchdog roles of citizens and civil liberties groups have often been hamstrung. In many countries politicians have found it expedient to conceal their decisions by invoking the talisman of public safety or emergency or by deferring to scientific ‘experts’.

COVID-19 has not only dislocated the social contract between citizen and State, but also among citizens themselves. The sight of supermarkets’ empty shelves and of anxious shoppers stockpiling food and other essentials has become routine across the world.² Wealth-based differences have become starker and social rage has increased, fuelled by extremist political groups both within and outside legislatures. The zombie metaphor of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a prescient foretaste of the world we now inhabit:

2 Panic buying in the United States has, however, extended to the purchase of guns and ammunition!

In his 1968 film, the zombies are a literal mass movement—a heaving, flesh-eating horde that up-ends the cosy, natural order of American society. One of the most its most startling scenes involves an undead daughter murdering its mother with a trowel; one generation suddenly turns on the other. The climactic scenes throw up an even more disturbing suggestion: as the small army of red necks roam the countryside, apparently enjoying the task of indiscriminately blasting everything they see, Romero strongly implies that the posse of shooters are little more than zombies themselves.³

3 Lambie 2019.

Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes⁴ obliges us to reconsider the relationship between the rule of law and power, between freedom and security, and the role of ignorance-induced fear and its effect on the political agenda.

4 Hobbes 1647: 4.

Surviving COVID

Among the dramatic challenges to stability and security, pandemics rank alongside war, revolution, and famine. Governments faced with the pervasive uncertainty and fear generated by threats to tranquillity requires not only firm leadership, but the clear determination of public policy and effective strategies to manage and overcome the crisis. Almost no nation has been spared the devastating effects Coronavirus has wreaked on lives, livelihoods, and economies. The social, political, and national security consequences of the pandemic are the chief focus of this work.

Toward the end of 2019 an individual in the notorious Huanan seafood market in Wuhan was reportedly infected with a virus that apparently emanated from an animal. The virus—later identified as COVID-19—spread across the globe infecting about 30 million people and causing (or contributing to) the death of about 950,000 at the time of writing. So-called ‘wet’ markets (which are more accurately described as wildlife markets) are common in China. The Huanan market has a section selling wild animals including badgers, wolf pups, snakes, bamboo rats, and porcupines, mostly kept cruelly in tiny cages with no apparent concern for their suffering. One stall offered about a hundred varieties of live animals ranging from foxes to peacocks to masked palm civets; the last-mentioned creature is regarded as instrumental in transferring the SARS virus from bats to humans in the 2002/3 epidemic.⁵ It has been reported that, as a result of the virus, China will ban the consumption of wild animals and clamp down on the illegal wildlife trade. According to a recent decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress it will—supposedly—completely ban the eating of wild animals and clamp down on the illegal wildlife trade before legislation is amended to protect health and ecological security.⁶

5 It has been suggested that an intermediary host between bats and humans may be the pangolin which is described by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as ‘the most illegally traded mammal in the world’. www.iucn.org/commissions/ssc-groups/mammals/specialist-groups-f-z/pangolin (Visited 22 April 2020). They are prized for their meat and the alleged medicinal properties of their scales. According to an article in Nature, pangolins were not listed as being sold in Wuhan, although this may be because their sale is unlawful. www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00364-2 (Visited 22 April 2020).

6 China Daily, 24 February 2020. See too ‘Shenzhen becomes first Chinese city to ban eating cats and dogs’ BBC News. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-52131940 (Visited 22 April 2020).

Although the World Health Organization published a warning on 31 December 2019, and early cases had been identified since 11 January 2020, the West waited until the end of February or in some cases as late as mid-March before acknowledging the seriousness of the situation and taking action.⁷ By contrast, several other countries, especially in Asia, such as Taiwan, activated their disease control system as early as 5 January 2020:

7 Schumaker, Erin. ‘Timeline: How coronavirus got started’, ABC News, 23 April 2020. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/timeline-coronavirus-started/story?id=69435165 (Visited 15 May 2020).

On December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was notified of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese officials began to board planes and assess passengers on direct flights from Wuhan for fever and pneumonia symptoms before passengers could deplane. As early as January 5, 2020, notification was expanded to include any individual who had traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and had a fever or symptoms of upper respiratory tract infection at the point of entry … On January 20, while sporadic cases were reported from China, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officially activated the CECC for severe special infectious pneumonia under NHCC, with the minister of health and welfare as the designated commander.⁸

8 Wang, Jason, Ng, Chun, Brook, Robert. 2020. Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan. JAMA. 2020; 323(14): 1341–1342. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.3151.

The manner in which different governments responded to the emergence of the disease made a significant difference to the death toll and the social fallout. There has been—inevitably—a parallel drawn between this disaster and previous pandemics, particularly the Spanish flu of 1918 which is estimated to have infected about 500 million people or a third of the world’s population. It ended the lives of at least 50 million people and generated a host of social and moral consequences:

Eugenics was a mainstream current of thought both before and after the 1918 flu, but the pandemic undermined it in at least one domain: infectious diseases. Previously, social Darwinist—and misguided—thinking about some human ‘races’ or castes being superior to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Confronting contagion
• 2 Science and power
• 3 Law, rights, and public policy
• 4 The technology of information
• 5 The politics of the pandemic
• Epilogue
• Index