The Covid Consensus

The New Politics of Global Inequality

Toby Green

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787385221
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386150
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Why does Western pandemic policy have support across the political spectrum, when its social impacts conflict with ideology on both right and left? During the pandemic, the Left has agreed that 'following the science' with hard lockdowns is the best way to preserve life; only irresponsible right-wing populists oppose them. But social science shows that while the rich have got richer, those suffering most under lockdown are the already disadvantaged: the poor, the young, and—most overlooked of all—the Global South. The UN is predicting tens of millions of deaths from hunger and warning that decades of development are being reversed. Equally, why have conservatives backed lockdowns and other major interventions, creating the big state that they usually abhor? These contradictions within the great consensus of Western pandemic response are part of a broader crisis in Western thought. Toby Green peels back the policy paradoxes to reveal irreconcilable beliefs in our societies. These deep divisions are now bursting into the open, with devastating consequences for the global poor.

1

THE POLITICIZATION OF A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS

For all the talk of the unprecendented times we are living in, there is nothing unprecedented about pandemics. What has been unprecedented with Covid-19 has been the response, not the infectious disease itself.

As we saw in the Introduction, the 1957–8 Asian Flu pandemic may have killed more people than Covid-19 in absolute terms, and certainly in proportion to the world’s population at the time.* More recently, just eleven years before the Covid-19 outbreak, the world was gripped by the fear of another new and potentially lethal disease, the H1N1 virus, or Swine Flu. The latter broke out in Mexico in the first part of 2009 before spreading around the world. At the time, there was a genuine alarm at the risks that the new virus might have for the human population. When reflecting on the onset of Covid-19 in 2020, it’s worth comparing this with the response to the Swine Flu epidemic, so that we can better assess what has happened now.

The predictions at the time were universally grim. In mid-July 2009 the United Kingdom’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, estimated that up to 65,000 people might die, and that in the best-case scenario there would be a mortality of 3,100.¹ In the US, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimated on 24 July that between 20 and 40% of the American population would be stricken with the H1N1 virus over the ensuing two years. According to the WHO, 2 billion infections globally was “a reasonable ballpark to be looking at”. Even though at that time there had been only 130,000 confirmed infections, Keiji Fukuda, a senior WHO official said that the likely figure was much higher than this, with 100,000 reported infections in the UK and a million suspected in the US—and that these were the early days of the pandemic’s spread. Initial estimates suggested that the number of deaths in the US could range between 90,000 and several hundred thousand.²

These projected levels of mortality were especially alarming since Swine Flu was known to be a virus which targeted children and young people (indeed 80% of those who eventually died from the pandemic were aged under 65—virtually the inverse of the mortality with Covid-19).³ This meant that although the initial projections of mortality were lower than with Covid-19, the number of life-years lost calculated through these projections was not incomparable. Unlike the case with the novel coronavirus, such projections and the age profile of the dead meant that Swine Flu could have had a major impact on the working population and provision of services. Yet while there was concern there was no considerable public alarm, and senior medical figures wisely cautioned against an overreaction. As the Guardian reported: “[Chief Medical Officer] Donaldson warned against panic about the projected death toll from a swine flu pandemic, noting that there had been 21,000 extra deaths over the winter of 1999–2000 due to seasonal flu and this had raised little public concern”.⁴

Meanwhile, the global medical community geared itself into action. As with Covid-19, much emphasis was placed on the development of a vaccine, the so-called Tamiflu jab.⁵ In the end a vaccine was available after six months, in October 2009, rather more quickly than has proved to be the case with Covid-19.⁶ Where there were significant outbreaks of the virus, moderate social distancing and quarantine measures were implemented. In Mexico, schools closed between 27 April and 10 May, public events were cancelled and public spaces closed, while commercial activity ceased: but there was no prohibition of socialising or family visits, and after this fortnight normal social life resumed.⁷ In 2009, these were the measures deemed proportionate and effective to limit the spread and mortality of a virus known to target overwhelmingly the working-age population.

And in the end, the dire predictions turned out to have been just that—predictions. As the CDC put it, “the impact of the (H1N1)pdm09 virus on the global population during the first year was less severe than that of previous pandemics”.⁸ Eventually Sir Liam Donaldson confirmed that the UK death toll was not 65,000, or even 3,100: it was 457, a CFR of just 0.026%, while in the US the CDC estimated that it was between 0.013 and 0.027%.⁹ This was evidence that initial computer-modelling predictions as to the spread and severity of a virus are often inaccurate, and do not become solid until several months into a pandemic’s spread when more reliable data has begun to emerge. One of the leading figures in developing the initial modelling projections was Professor Neil Ferguson, who predicted a CFR from Swine Flu in the range of 0.3 to 1.5%, with 0.4% the most likely outcome—something which turned out to be an overestimate by a factor of 10 in the British case, and perhaps even more in the American case.¹⁰

Several lessons could have been learnt from the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009. Globally, the H1N1 virus was certainly a serious disease, and in fact somewhere between 150,000 and 540,000 people died worldwide.¹¹ 80% of these fatalities were in people aged under 65, and the projections had been that the death rate would be much higher. National governments implemented quarantine measures but these were time-restricted to no more than a couple of weeks, and the idea of shutting down huge swathes of society for up to a year simply never occurred to policymakers and public health experts. As it turned out, society continued to function, and the initial projections of the WHO and Ferguson’s team proved to have been exaggerated. As the Guardian had reported the best approach was not to panic, to implement in a timely manner measured and time-restricted local restrictions which protected the vulnerable, and at the same time to put everything into developing a safe vaccine as quickly as possible, and meantime to isolate especially severe outbreaks for a few weeks.

* * *

As most people reading this book will know, there was a real sense of global panic related to the Covid-19 virus in the first weeks of March 2020. People all around the world favoured the imposition of containment measures which just two months before the WHO representative in China had described as unprecedented. Opinion polls showed strong public support for these steps, and this was not just in Europe and the US. As George Bob-Milliar, a political scientist at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, put it: “There was panic and fear everywhere. We did not know what this virus was. Everyone just wanted Ghana to shut down”—which was indeed what happened as Ghana closed its ports and airspace to all but essential medical supplies.¹²

The panic began on 9 March following the growth of the mortality figures in the north of Italy and the Italian government’s imposition of the first nationwide lockdown in the West.¹³ The following two weeks saw what can only be described as an episode of global hysteria as countries shut their borders from one day to the next, people became stranded thousands of miles from their homes, and schools and workplaces closed worldwide, while day-to-day medical appointments and operations were cancelled as humanity became Covid-obsessed. What were the causes of this panic, where in 2009 none of this had been in evidence with Swine Flu? Several factors can be identified: the rise of social media since 2009 (with Facebook founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, this was still in a growth phase at that point), the emergence of a new media model based on click-through-advertising, growing awareness of the relationship between environmental erosion and disease outbreaks (as had been shown in the 2014 Ebola epidemic), and the polarisation of societies worldwide that had emerged alongside the rise of aggressive nationalisms in the preceding five or six years. No doubt there are more factors which others will be able to identify in time, but these are the ones that I will focus on here. Over the course of this chapter, we will see how the combination of these factors drove a response to the new virus which was completely out of proportion to anything that had happened before in world history.

In Italy, the realisation that a new virus had emerged in the country had grown steadily throughout February. The first identified cases of Covid-19 outside China were on 30 January, when two Chinese tourists visiting Rome returned Covid-positive results.¹⁴ By 21 February, clusters of cases were being identified in northern Italy, and on 22 February eleven municipalities in Lombardy province were placed under quarantine, covering a population of around 50,000 people.¹⁵ This was all in keeping with traditional quarantining protocols such as had been used for centuries, and had also been used during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009: isolating on a very local level places where the virus was present. However, following a visit to affected areas of China, on 24 February the WHO published a report with new guidelines for radical containment measures based on the Chinese experience, and the narrative began to change.*

The Italian government policy first showed signs of moving towards a national framework on 1 March, when ministers divided the country into three zones, or tiers: a red zone where the outbreak was at its worst and a quarantine was in place, a yellow zone where sports and cultural events were suspended and restaurants and bars could only provide table-service for clients, and the rest of the country where new hygiene measures were imposed in schools, public buildings, and workplaces.¹⁶ At the time, the government said that these measures would be in place “at least until 8 March”—but by that date, the country was on the eve of the first national lockdown in world history.¹⁷

What were the initial drivers of this novel direction in Italian government policy? With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the international response to the outbreak of Covid-19 in the country was a major push-factor, gearing into place even before the publication of the WHO report on 24 February. While in 2009 important figures in science, medicine and government sought to downplay any panic or fear related to Swine Flu, this became an outlier approach subject to ridicule in 2020. As soon as the Italian government had placed the eleven municipalities in quarantine, international responses came. On 23 February, a train travelling from Venice to Munich was stopped at the Austrian border, and a bus heading from Milan to Lyon was intercepted at Lyon-Perrache station over concerns that passengers were exhibiting “flu-like symptoms”.¹⁸ On 24 February, passengers on an Alitalia flight from Rome were prevented from entering Mauritius and ordered to quarantine for two weeks or return home—forty of them decided to go straight back to Italy.¹⁹ On 27 February, Israel barred entry for passengers from Italy, and the following day Germany implemented new entry requirements for passengers from Italy to declare their medical condition.²⁰ Numerous other countries imposed restrictions. And then on 8 March, when the lockdown of the north of Italy had already been implemented, and just a day before the national lockdown, the Czech prime minister Andrej Babis was quoted as saying that the Italian government had not gone far enough, and should ban all its citizens from travelling in Europe.²¹

In other words, the international fear of contagion was high. Perhaps two factors can be identified as driving this response. The first was the growing mediatisation of reality, the commercial structures which drive this, and the way in which media groups seized on initial data to drive a fear of the virus which led to a certain set of panic-driven responses. The influence of media organisations in shaping narratives and public perceptions of risk and reality had certainly grown since the Swine Flu pandemic, and the accelerating influence of this mediatisation had been compounded by the rise of social media. Moreover, the increasing dependence of these media companies on Internet advertising driven by the volumes of article clicks did not encourage them to underestimate the severity of the new virus.

Some important examples show how this tendency to emphasise alarm in order to attract clicks had a serious impact on the initial reporting of the pandemic. On 23 February, Sky News reported in the United Kingdom that the number of cases of the pandemic in Italy had “soared” to two hundred—hardly an appropriate verb to reach for where there had as yet been only seven deaths, and 634,432 people had died in Italy during 2019.²² Another example was the way in which, as we saw in the previous chapter, the figure of 3.4% circulated widely as a mortality rate early on. However, in the initial discussion of these statistics, sources at the WHO had specifically stated that this was not a mortality rate as such (because it was not known how many people had had Covid without being tested); yet there was no correction of this misleading reporting of the statistic by the WHO or by the media outlets in question.²³

A second major driver of this international fear of contagion was the growing rise of nationalism that had come to characterise the world political scene since the Swine Flu outbreak of 2009. The fractured and divided political sphere of the previous ten years meant that the qualities of calm and proportion had long departed from political discourse. The emergence of populist national governments in the US under Donald Trump and Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, as well as across Europe in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and the strength of populist nationalist movements in countries such as Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands (in all of which t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Politicization of a Public Health Crisis
• 2. Covid and Inequality in the West
• 3. Covid-19 and the Global Poor
• 4. Covid-19 and the Future of Democratic Capitalism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index