In this Information Age, the value of science as the leading source for public policy on health has largely been replaced with the mood of the masses, and from the need of political leaders to respond, partly to save their political fortunes. With the majority of governments, the goal of reducing the spread of diseases like the coronavirus and keeping people safe has taken a back seat to politics.
This delicate balance plays itself out on a daily basis, and in an instant, with new outlets blaring a loud and obnoxious combination of opinions and facts, often directed in an effort to tip opinion in favor of their favorite political cause. With major elections looming on the horizon in the United States and other countries, the politicization of the pandemic has become a convenient narrative by candidates, their support base, and the media, with the aim to credit or discredit the efforts of political leaders in implementing a domestically homogeneous respond, much less one—a global one.
In this modern political landscape, several factors have and will continue to impact the global outcome: the fatality rates and the economic fallout and recovery from the pandemic. I wish to highlight four of the main factors and will describe them, their impact, and an outlook as to how these factors will change as the pandemic progresses. These four factors, such as globalization, technology, ideology, and inequality, are intricately intertwined and in fact form the basis for the pervasive political movements that impact the policy responses that unfold before our eyes on a daily basis.
Some 2000 years ago, true globalization began as luxury goods from China started to find their way to Rome, once the capital of the Western world, via the Silk Road. Coincidentally, much of the Roman empire was undergoing a metamorphosis that culminated in the move toward its fragmentation and its eventual conversion into the Holy Roman Empire, eventually leading to the rooting of the philosophy of Christianity in Western daily life, which has, since that era, formed the basis of many political movements. This global spreading of goods, people, services, and philosophy that flourished over the last 2000 years has perhaps faced its greatest challenge and, at the same time, found its most powerful fuel over the last century, as advances in discovery, technology, and information has propelled science to the forefront of human consciousness, effectively upending the traditional dominance of religious ideology.
I say, this amazing phenomenon of accelerated change has caused us as humans to question every facet of our lives upon which our faith and our fortunes have been based.
The year 2020 has become symbolic of a perfect political storm. A storm where in the midst of a pandemic, the most fundamental clash of culture and counterculture, liberal vs conservative, and North vs South is occurring. This global resurgence in civil rights, this cry for racial equality, and this challenge of traditional law enforcement could not have come at a more pivotal time and at a time when governments are struggling with pandemic response and the economic fallout caused by the unprecedented phenomenon of a crash in global supply and demand.
Like every other factor in human development, globalization has also accelerated with the advancement in science, technology, and information over the past 100 years. With it has come an explosion in human interaction through travel and through electronic exchanges of ideas and transactions. Language barriers and distance have been canceled out by a connected global education system and by improved and lower-cost transportation. This shrinking of our world has brought humans closer together physically and figuratively, creating the perfect conduit upon which new and deadly viruses like the coronavirus have conveniently hitched a ride for its great world tour.
This novel hitchhiker was predicted, but the complications of our modern world were never factored into the equation. It is important to point out that for the 5 years prior to 2020, there has been a global move toward nationalism, which has seen a new breed of world leaders take the centre stage in the world’s largest economies. Leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Andrés Manual López Obrador in Mexico have taken extreme nationalistic stances to push a new brand of populism in a democratic context. The mass movements fuelled by the resulting polarization of citizens in these countries have become a fertile ground for the use of and conversely the manipulation of facts and science with an aim to appeal to the extreme bases.
In the United States, the left leaning media has hyped the pandemic, and their analysis of the response by the White House has become a very powerful vehicle to discredit the Trump administration. For their part, the Trump campaign has itself subtly encouraged a rejection of scientific-based advice on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), including the outright rejection of mask wearing, along with a campaign to prematurely reopen states and cities, despite scientific and health advice to the contrary. This polarization of diverse groups by both sides of the political landscape, and the politicization of the pandemic has seriously thwarted the efforts of the health managers to present a unified message to the general public. Even more seriously, the mixed message from the White House, and the refusal of the administration to provide federal directives, and instead to cede authority and final decisions on COVID-19 policy to the state governors, has led to uneven responses.
The holy grail of any pandemic response is to flatten the curve. That is, employing coordinated efforts by the government and the public to reduce the infection rate in order that medical systems, research, and readiness can get ahead of the inevitable rush that comes from a large number of ill persons. In a situation where mixed signals are given by those that govern and where political polarization among citizens is prevalent, the ability to achieve the flattening of the curve becomes ever more difficult. In the case of these countries, the populist messages and the very example of the actions of popular leaders have caused an immediate spike in the curve after quarantine efforts have been eased.
The lack of coordination on COVID-19 response policy inside nations has led to an even more difficult situation in a globalized world. While much of Europe, Canada, and Asia and countless smaller dependent nations have been successful in flattening their curve, the fact that large trading and tourism source markets like the United States and Brazil has led to severe travel restrictions against citizens of those countries. The United States, traditionally a gold mine of high spending tourists, has effectively become a virtual leper colony, with a pervasive fear in destination management that they are inviting the importation of new infections.
From the early days of the pandemic, travel and leisure has fallen to a level where airlines, cruise lines, hotels, and restaurants can no longer cover their operating costs much less make a profit. This temporary shutdown was to have ended with a coordinated and managed reopening, whereby companies bolstered by government aid can restart services with a move toward full operation under new management guidelines. International passenger carriers have thrived with globalization from open movements of mass numbers of passengers across states and international borders. The halting of these movements by much of the world has left an unprecedented number of airplanes and cruise ships idle, stripping billions from the valuations of these companies, and massive layoffs of employees. In acts of desperation, global carriers have chosen to push the envelope and to announce a continuation of travel services, despite the severe drop in demand resulting from increasing cost of compliance and screening, traveler fear, and personal economic uncertainties.
The standard protocol of pandemic control of a respiratory disease requires the controlling of distances among people in order to slow infection spreads while waiting for science and medical responses to catch up with vaccines and hospital capacity. This temporary environment is in direct conflict with a world that was built on maximizing the carrying capacity of humans in aircraft, cruise ships, concerts, public transports, offices, and residential structures. As the norm of maximum capacity gets interrupted, so do the profits from it, and when profits get interrupted in a capitalist society, politicians are compelled to act, often in desperation, as the need for earning slowly starts to override the ideal for public health and wellness.
Globally interconnected market forces and financial markets react to the changes in demand and the damage to profitability, as we see the incomes of major industries evaporate before our very eyes. Entertainment, sports, travel, and leisure have been on virtual shutdowns with hundreds of millions of employees worldwide out of work. Predictions by economists of doom have prompted political leaders to weigh the risks of mortality of a relatively small percentage of the global population against the long-term damage from economic recession. This conflict plays itself out on every news outlet, where messages from science-based pandemic managers like the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, conflict with the messages from the White House on a daily basis. In the United States, this confusion has had a marked impact on the growth in new cases and in mortality rates, making that country the new epicenter for COVID-19.
In Brazil, the approach by President Jairo Bolsonaro has been even more radical, and the statistics have shown similar results to the United States. Early presidential rhetoric that contradicted science, along with images of the President void of personal protection, while openly criticizing their use, have led to an uneven adoption of best practices by the general population. Likewise, in Mexico, the government continued business as usual, not opting for lockdowns or border closures, and as of today, Mexico is considered to have the fastest growth in cases in the world.
Perhaps the worst outcome of the political challenges to controlling the pandemic has been the sharp divide among political supporters in those polarized nations. In the United States, the wearing of masks has become a statement of political preference instead of a health measure, and the packing of stadiums for political rallies with barefaced throngs of shouting supporters fly in the face of proper quarantine protocols.
The impact of technology in today’s world has been perhaps the greatest catalyst of change, and perhaps the most important defining factor compared to pandemics from past centuries. The forefront of this has been the great advances in information technology. The movement of news and updates from across the world occurs in seconds, and the person to person sharing of information in an instant at all levels of society and by all demographics has kept the world informed and forewarned. This has also, to some extent, led to significant movement of misinformation, hype, and the spread of ideology that has hampered the response to COVID-19.
The movement of information about virus spreads from its beginnings in Wuhan, China, was a lot faster than the movement of the actual virus, which gave health authorities the ability to prepare and to react more effectively.
Information movement, however, is only the tip of the technological advances that have helped governments to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic threat. As the disease travels around the world and as infections and deaths increase, many governments are turning to technology to help to flatten the curve. Some fear, however, that the use of technology, in particular those aimed at tracking or controlling citizens, may be a harbinger of a Big Brother future that has been well portrayed by Hollywood over the years. This dilemma between health response and freedom is yet another battle that is being waged and a situation that preoccupies political leaders in this pandemic era.
Several countries including Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and even Germany and Israel are using the global positioning system (GPS) via mobile phones to track the movements of people and to enforce quarantines against the natural urge of people to move freely. South Korea has gone so far as to combine GPS tracking with credit card activity and surveillance footage to trace the movements of persons who may be infected or may be in contact with the virus. Some countries have adopted a mandatory use of a tracking wristband for arriving visitors as a means to enforcing quarantine rules and to track their movements when in country. Even more extreme measures are being employed with the use of drones for surveillance, to disinfect public areas, to remotely monitor body temperatures, and to police the movements of people within managed corridors.
The thought of this new electronically controlled police state is a frightening one, if one were to remove the pandemic from the equation. The use of artificial intelligence for instance to capture and analyze data and to provide recommendations to policy makers on actions invokes images from the dystopian future portrayed in the movie, the Matrix, and provides a ripe ground for conspiracy theorists and libertarians to raise alarms. In a pandemic, however, justification for the technology is more easily achieved, and these advances are therefore slowly finding their way into society, approved by political leaders, as tools to combat the virus and to help society to return to normal. This choice between Big Brother surveillance and an uncontrolled spread of the virus has become perhaps one of the greatest one for society to make in this modern era, as the aftermath of this technology use may in fact have a more profound impact on our future than the pandemic itself.
So, what happens after the health crisis is over? As with any technological shift, people will eventually become comfortable with its existence and presence in our daily lives. The traditional practice of confidentiality in managing health data suddenly becomes blurred as personal and public health data converges in the need for case management, to conduct contact tracing, and to isolate and quarantine individuals who are deemed as risky to the community. The more people contract the disease, the less will be the stigma placed on those with the infection, and the less important will be the need to keep that information confidential.
The need for social isolation will also encourage the growth of telemedicine technology. Remote monitoring will expand to include smart devices connected to remote monitoring technology that will allow patients to be “seen” by a doctor who is not present. The ability to monitor vital signs and even administer medication will become a norm, again raising questions of data security, cyber invasions, and personal privacy.
Even more innocuous forms of technology are being propelled due to the COVID-19 threat. In developing countries, governments are scrambling to accelerate the development of digital services not only to minimize physical interactions but also to bring more efficiency to government. This movement toward digitization is being followed by private enterprises that find the need to deliver goods and services to a home-bound population. The proliferation of online vendors, new payment, and delivery systems using technology is spawning a boom in the sale of technology and in innovation, and perhaps for the first time in the world’s history, the infrastructure for technological connectivity is as important as the physical infrastructure of a nation.
This rapid transformation of nations into the digital realm also brings major challenges for political leaders in developing countries. Legislation has to be updated in many respects as most governments services are designed on paper-based analog systems, and direct online citizen access requires new technologies like cloud computing, internet protocols, and strong encryption. Beyond this, the concept of digital signatures can only work if national identification and authentications frameworks are strong, and online transactions only work with trustworthy and efficient electronic payments systems. Even in the United States, the deployment of the unemployment benefits to the burgeoning ranks of displaced workers due to the pandemic has been less than ideal, with workers standing in long lines in defiance to quarantine orders to register for and inquire about their benefits. In other countries where financial inclusion is low, the registration for and distribution of aid and food packages became a monumental task.
Technology for the management of the actual pandemic has also seen a surge. The ability to manage the mass amounts of data gathered from contact tracing activities and to use that data effectively is a task that is difficult for human teams. For this reason, the development of data systems to gather, disseminate, utilize, and analyze health data to inform political decisions has become a key in this fight against the virus. Due to fundamental rights governing privacy, most nations with highly developed democracies have been slow to adopt technologies to support the invasive efforts needed for contact tracing.
Even the efforts from Google and Apple have been measured with a great deal of caution and awareness of privacy. These tech giants teamed up and entered the equation by developing apps on their platform that would allow individuals to conduct proximity tracking and tracing. That is to say, to allow individual to monitor their surroundings for the presence of infected persons in order to avoid making contact or to make a decision to self-isolate. Their efforts have clashed with governments like the United Kingdom who initially rejected the use of these technologies in their contact tracing efforts because those companies would not provide data to government health managers but eventually reverted to the Google/Apple platform after spending millions on their own solution that could not pass the test for privacy and security.
The pandemic has caused people to turn to technology more and more to manage their daily lives for staying connected with family and friends, for working remotely, to learn, to access medical care, and even as a conduit to deliver food and other necessary supplies. This potential to bring us closer together and to make us safer, healthier, and happier, as promised by the architects of this Information Age, is being realized in a rapid manner in front of our eyes. On the other hand, never before have we been as challenged to ensure reliability in that connectivity, as it is no longer a novelty, but a necessity. The risk of attacks on our privacy as a result of increased surveillance by governments and the potential misuse of data for malice or for profit are more prevalent today, yet we must learn how to balance those risks against the benefits to be gained in this and future fights against viruses that can cause pandemics.
Political leaders are on the front line in charting the safe path for the use of technology in this pandemic era. It means that they must take steps to ensure universal access to technology by all, from every child who’s only choice for education is online to the infirm that needs access to virtual health care in a physical system that is overburdened due to COVID-19 spikes. The balance between ethics, inequality, and policy overreach as we adopt this new way of living is perhaps one of the most important debate that has to be had as we maneuver this challenge.
It is apparent that conservative political ideology may have delayed protective policy implementation and promoted the spread of COVID-19 in the United States. Similar outcomes have been revealed in Brazil, Mexico, and in some countries in Europe, where political ideology has polarized citizens and political lines are drawn between liberal and conservative political camps.
The politicization of COVID-19 in the United States has played a key role in the virus’s proliferation, with conservatives feeling less concerned about the virus than liberals as a result of President Donald Trump’s downplaying the pandemic’s urgency. On the other side, the anti-Trump media has not lost a moment in highlighting the president’s failures and missteps in relation to the pandemic, often ridiculing his gaffes and actions, personifying him as the face of pandemic failure. While his approach encouraged anti-quarantine sentiment and behavior among his followers, the media onslaught served as reinforcement for them to be even more stubborn against quarantine measures and to latch on to baseless conspiracy theories to bolster their arguments.
The problem with this political drama is that the fact that lives are at risk seems to be a backdrop to a presidential campaign, on one side to reinforce ideology and on the other hand to depose possibly one of the most polarizing figures in American political history.
Along with this polarized view of COVID-19 in free democracies, there is a marked rise in belief in conspiracy theories about the disease and the pandemic in general, widely shared via social media platforms.
A study by King’s College published in the Journal of Psychological Medicine finds that people who get their news from social media sources are more likely to break lockdown rules. The researchers tested seven statements about COVID-19, revealing the following levels of belief:
- •
Three in 10 (30%) think coronavirus was probably created in a laboratory, up from a quarter (25%) at the beginning of April.
- •
Three in 10 (28%) think most people in the United Kingdom have already had coronavirus without realizing it.
- •
Three in 10 (30%) believe the COVID-19 death toll is being deliberately reduced or hidden by the authorities.
- •
One in seven (14%) believe the death toll is being deliberately exaggerated by the authorities.
- •
One in eight (13%) believe that the current pandemic is part of a global effort to force everyone to be vaccinated.
- •
More than one in 20 (8%) believe that the symptoms that most people blame on COVID-19 appear to be connected to 5G network radiation.
- •
More than one in 20 (7%) believe there is no hard evidence that COVID-19 really exists.
In his analysis of the study, Professor Bobby Duffy wrote, “there are clear links between belief in conspiracies and both lower trust in government and less compliance with the guidelines set to control the disease. Where people get their information about the virus is also strongly related, with both believing in conspiracies and breaking the lockdown rules clearly linked to getting more of your information from social media.”
In such an environment, it becomes extremely difficult for political leaders who are seeking reelection to stick hard and fast to facts and science in their rhetoric. The ability to educate such a large swath of the population in sufficient time in order that the rules for quarantine and pandemic management can be properly enforced becomes extremely difficult. In China and other Asian nations that are accustomed to authoritarian imposed public health, the compliance has been much higher.
In the United States, the front line of this ideological war sits with the policy of wearing masks. While it is widely accepted that this practice contributed greatly to the flattening of the curve in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, adverse ideology has equated mask wearing with political preference, with curtailing of freedoms, and in general with being a liberal vs a conservative. This growing pandemic of ideology, and the fact that the United States is now the epicenter of the global pandemic with no signs that their second curve will slow down, is a major concern in the rest of the world, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. In this hemisphere, infections are spreading rapidly through Latin America and the Caribbean into South America, effectively devastating the already fragile economies of the region.
The actual direct impact of COVID-19 is only now just being felt, with every country in the world feeling either the impacts on their health systems or on their economy. At some point when the pandemic eases, the entire human family will have to live with its effects for years to come, but the costs will not be the same for all. While COVID-19 has respected no border, even after its gone, it will continue to discriminate against the most vulnerable.
The predictions are alarming. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) expects that for the first time since prior to 1990, the global human development index, a combined measure of the world’s education, health, and living conditions, will decline this year. This decline will occur in every region. Global per capita income is expected to fall by 4%, and the World Bank has warned that the impact of the virus could push between 40 and 60 million people into extreme poverty this year, with sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia being the hardest hit.
The International Labour Organization estimates that half of working people could lose their jobs in just 6 months of the crisis, and the virus could cost the global economy about US$10 trillion this year alone.
COVID-19 is exposing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. In the developed world, the wealthy have had the luxury of quarantining in their vacation homes and on private yachts, while poor displaced workers with school children risk being evicted from cramped rental apartments. The payment of economic relief has also been slow in coming, and the spread of the relief itself is discriminatory, with little going to small businesses, resulting in mass business failures due to the prolonged shutdown.
Inequality, however, is on the most prominent display as we look at the ability of nations to respond to the crisis. Early on, in the scramble for scarce medical supplies, diversion of equipment and supplies destined for small vulnerable nations by the United States became a policy, even resulting in seizures during transit. In poor overpopulated nations like India and other parts of Asia, millions of displaced workers were forced to walk for days to return to their home villages, with many sleeping in the open with unsanitary conditions because there are no resources to assist them.
The disparity in medical capacity has also come into sharp focus. According to UNDP data, the most developed countries have 55 hospital beds, more than 30 doctors, and 81 nurses for every 10,000 people. By contrast, in the less developed countries, there are only 7 beds, 2.5 doctors, and 6 nurses for the same number of people. And as previously pointed out, lockdowns have made the digital divide more obvious, with billions of people who have no access to electricity or running water, much less the internet, which shuts them out from being able to interact with family or to participate in the new norm of online learning.
With schools’ closure and the divides in distance learning, UNDP estimates indicate that 86% of primary school-age children in low human development countries are currently not getting an education, compared to just 20% in countries with very high human development.
With schools closed, UNDP estimates that effective out of school rates could regress to levels not seen since the 1980s—the largest reversal ever—taking us back to a time before the Sustainable Development Goals or even the Millennium Development Goals and threatening the hard work and progress of the past 30 years.
The great economic pandemic is the looming challenge that all nations will face, but none more profoundly than developing nations. For governments, this challenge will be further exacerbated by the fragility of their economies and the debt levels that they have had to manage even before the pandemic.
The international monetary fund (IMF) estimates that the cost of the global response so far includes fiscal actions amounting to almost $11 trillion to contain the pandemic and its damage to the economy as well as central bank actions amounting to over $6 trillion. The share of this burden in developed countries is enormous; however, those countries’ ability to borrow these massive numbers comes simply from their capacity to increase their money supply with hardly any impact on their creditworthiness. In the case of developing countries, however, the capacity to borrow is severely constrained by ratios that only apply in their case, with an ever-looming threat that falling currency values and international credit ratings will signal instant Armageddon.
In this reality where productivity is down, and where both demand and supply are on the ropes at the same time, government policy has to be carefully assessed. Debt ceilings that propelled growth 5 years ago are no longer valid, and risk assessment cannot be done using the same metrics. Until institutions like the IMF and others make these adjustments, however, the developing world must rely principally on dwindling credit and on the charity of friendly nations in order that they can meet the demands for basic health, food, and shelter by its residents.
Those nations that are reliant on tourism, like most of the smaller Caribbean nations, face the greatest risk. Not only are they vulnerable from imported COVID-19 infections in the short term, but also the disappearance of overnight and cruise tourism poses an even greater risk of economic regression, mass unemployment, and social unrest.
In the COVID-19 era, our present preoccupation with the management of the pandemic is only the beginning of the challenges facing governments across the globe. This era will require a new version of political will. Never before has political leadership been challenged as it will be in the next few years.
References
Stay updated, free articles. Join our Telegram channel
Full access? Get Clinical Tree
