It’s been a year since COVID-19 made headlines. Since then, the pandemic has changed everything we thought we knew about managing a crisis.
About 100 million people around the world have been infected with the deadly virus; more than 2 million have died. The long-term health effects are still being discovered. Vaccines are starting to be administered, but the rollout process is complicated.
In some cases, countries with more evolved resources have fared worse than those with fewer resources. Nations with similar governments and demographics have had vastly different outcomes. Pandemic playbooks have been thrown out the window.
How we predicted the pandemic would play out was completely wrong.
A major report, led by a team based at Harvard, Cornell and Arizona State universities involving more than 60 researchers from around the world argue we’ve been using the wrong metrics this entire time.
Questions about which country did best at managing the crisis and producing the best outcomes are misplaced — they are too narrow in focus and are being asked too early to understand the full ramifications of the virus, the authors argue.
Although a Lowy report ranked Australia as the gold standard for COVID management, the American report raises questions about just how well we’re actually doing.
It also outlines five key fallacies policymakers need to ditch when COVID 2.0 rolls around.
How will we know who did well?
A country’s success will hinge on how the interlinked systems of public health, the economy and politics responded to the crisis, the report argues.
Just as the virus found and exacerbated pre-existing medical conditions in individual bodies, so the pandemic found and revealed pre-existing weaknesses in the body politic, exploiting and aggravating them.
Wherever there were structural weaknesses in the health, economic, and political systems when the pandemic began, the difficulties of coping with the virus significantly worsened them.
We have only so many tools to battle an infectious disease, and countries used the same suite of measures: targeting the virus, and targeting social practices
The first strategy often focused on a silver bullet solution, be it a vaccine or border bubble. The second was more controversial, especially as populations became fatigued with strict rules on social gatherings.
How effective these strategies were depended largely on how cohesive a government was, and how much its constituents trusted its leaders. The report placed countries’ responses in three categories: control, consensus, chaos.
Taiwan — which learnt from SARS and swine flu and quickly coordinated information and resources, a generous stimulus package and had high political approval ratings — was a control country.
Germany and Australia — which achieved support for social democratic responses through coalitions between political parties, from science-driven responses, and helping companies retain workers — were consensus countries.
The US and India were chaos countries. Political parties were polarised and the pandemic was used to push dangerous rhetoric — such as in India, where the pandemic was blamed on Muslim minorities.
What we thought we knew
A playbook can manage a plague
Policymakers assume when following a set game plan that key figures will play the part assigned to them. But if politics change, different games are played. The US, for example, disregarded the ebola playbook — with Republicans wrongly accusing the Obama administration of never providing one.
In an emergency, politics takes a backseat to policy
During a pandemic, pre-existing issues in a country’s economy or political system are amplified. Countries where the political parties generally get along tended to act in solidarity; others that have a deep divide between ethnic or socio-economic groups or political parties saw a distrust in government elites and rifts between groups grow.
Indicators of success and failure are clear
How groups measure success was constantly contested. In Australia there were debates about whether the hit to the economy was worth extending the lifespan of those in aged care. What’s deemed an important measure changed over the course of the pandemic and were tied to political decisions.
Science advisers enable policymakers to choose the best policies
Even in science, experts are often divided with technical knowledge subject to interpretation. Populations which trusted official advice were more likely to trust their governments.
Distrust in public health advice reflects scientific illiteracy
No one is certain about what they’re talking about. Health officials debate facts, and predictions and advice change. But vaccine hesitancy is often born from real history — such as minority groups being used as medical guinea pigs. Vaccine hesitancy among Black people in the US is higher than the general population. Across the 1900s, Black men were left untreated for syphilis even when treatment became available as part of a medical study.
With regard to the lives vs economy debate pushed by the looniest of our loony RWNJs – it’s more complicated than that. Even accepting their argument that a few extra months or years of life for our elders is not worth the damage to the economy, there are other costs to allowing an unchecked pandemic:
Of course the Andrew Bolts don’t really give a rats about the employment prospects of working class youth – they and theirs are largely secured from the health risks by their financial advantages, and their concern is that those same financial advantages should not be diminished in any small way.
There is a bigger factor in letting it rip, the more people who catch it the more Covid will mutate that’s how evolution works. Mutations generally are weaker but sometime a real killer mutation happens, imagine if a mutation had a 60% death rate.
You’re absolutely right TonyP, and the recent variants in UK etc, seem to point in that direction. Not increased death rate, but still a more dangerous version rather than a less dangerous one.
Cheers Kmart and Tony. Saved me pointing it out.
Thanks for raising the issue of community science illiteracy as a factor here. Nearly every discussion about the dire state of STEM in Oz prioritises direct economic and industry issues, not the sociological and community impact of having a scientifically under-informed population. In an increasingly tech driven world a low level of STEM knowledge will drive a range of unfortunate outcomes – anti vax being just one of them.
Yet another analysis and commentary by an Australian that fails to acknowledge that the country doing the best, in the world so far, is just off the east coast, a short three hour plane ride away. Closer than Perth. No, one must not look there, even though the Lowy Institute did. Perhaps a better use of Crikey readers time would be to examine how such a result was achieved while Australians still grapple with the inability to leave the country (unless you’re and ex-PM or treasurer or a Cardinal) internal border ups and down, hotspots, and premiers who don’t even talk amongst themselves as QLand and NSWLand showed us just yesterday!
To be fair NZ is effectively the size of NSW or Vic in terms of population and resources so a better metric would be “what size population unit is best for consistently applied pandemic control measures”. Both too small and too big seem to have issues.. Actually treating NZ like a state in terms of risk would be useful here (permits, traffic light systems etc). Would like to know more about this in relation to similar sizes countries.
True about New Zealand. Another good comparison might be with Germany. We are both federations where there had to be involvement of state/lander governments.How that relationship worked – or didn’t – would be very interesting.
Clearly there are also differences – we are an island that can readily control its borders and Germany is not – plus it is part of a European arrangement where there is/was free flow of people (Schengen).
Is it just me, or does this article seemingly just stop halfway? Either that, or it’s making a hell of a strange argument.
If we ditch faith in consensus politics, science (however hotly debated), and having clear measurements of success … what, pray tell, are we replacing them with?
Thought that too. Used up her word count perhaps.
It’s the Curse of the Listicle Compiler – because the exercise is to fill a blank space with cut’n’paste snippets rather than coherence.
The concept of an essay – proposition, background, analysis & conclusion would simply never occur to such a myrmidon as that would require some comprehension of the subject matter.
I don’t actually see how the content of this article, such as it is, actually supports the clickbait headline. It is all common sense and does not at all support that we all got it wrong or that we were measuring the wrong things?
I always enjoy the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments as the reptiles of the press apologise to their readers for getting it wrong in the first place.