A Civics Lesson From the Pandemic

As America has struggled to respond to Covid-19, the virus has reminded everyone of how disorganized the country’s patchwork, federalized system of government can be. (As Fareed has written, the “challenge of creating a national strategy” to confront the virus in the US “is complicated by the reality that the true power in public health lies with 2,684 state, local and tribal systems, each jealously guarding its independence.”) But rather than any problem with the system, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen argues in a new Foreign Affairs essay, Covid-19 has exposed a lack of civic competence in America’s citizenry.

President Trump has failed to lead everyone in the right direction, Allen argues, but American citizens haven’t handled it well, either. When it came time to make complicated decisions about lockdown policies—to weigh the advice of health experts against that of economists on a localized, case-by-case basis—Americans did not congeal around the common purpose of solving the problem. A civic shortfall revealed itself well before the pandemic, after Trump’s election in 2016, Allen argues: “What astonished me was how few people knew where to start,” Allen writes writes of those disgruntled over Trump’s win. “They did not know how to call a meeting, how to engage their fellow Americans in a conversation about diagnosing their circumstances and finding some sort of shared purpose. All that constitutional democracy is, is a set of institutions that give people the chance to do these things and, if they do them well, to shape their communities. Yet Americans no longer understood how to use the machinery sitting all around them.” The civic deficit has been on display again during the pandemic, she writes.

So while the federal government may have failed a leadership test, Allen argues, Covid-19 has revealed a need for better civic awareness. “The federal government spends $54 per student per year on the STEM fields,” Allen notes, lamenting a decline in civics education in American high schools. “The figure for civics education: five cents.” It’s not America’s system of government that’s the problem, Allen argues; it’s that we’ve forgotten how to use it.

South Asia: The Next Region to Be Hit?

“Over the past week Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have largely lifted nationwide lockdowns intended to curb the spread of covid-19,” The Economist writes. “The freeing of 1.7bn people—more than a fifth of humanity—from varied restrictions will bring relief to the region’s battered economies.” But along with that lifting has come a rise in cases, the magazine writes, predicting South Asia could be the next world region to be hit hard by the virus.

Troublingly, health systems are coming under strain: “Three medical interns at another hospital in the centre of Mumbai recently released a video claiming that they had been left for hours in sole charge of 35 seriously ill covid-19 patients, with no doctors, nursing or cleaning staff to help,” the magazine writes. “Doctors in Pakistan say the government’s claim that there are adequate hospital beds is nonsense.”

In India, the magazine writes, one can partly blame the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, as a sudden lockdown led migrant workers to rush home—just the kind of travel one wants to avoid encouraging during the pandemic. “The authorities first tried to block the movement, bottling migrants in urban slums with the highest infection rates, and then allowed perhaps 20m workers to leave, spreading the disease across the country,” the magazine writes. As Amy Kazmin wrote late last month for the Financial Times, India swiftly implemented the world’s largest lockdown—only to completely reverse it. As government data show, cases are now rising fast.

Former WHO Chief Says Europe Acted Too Slowly

Former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland headed the World Health Organization as its director-general from 1998 to 2003, a stretch that included the SARS epidemic—and China’s lack of transparency surrounding it. In an interview with Der Spiegel this week, Brundtland defended current WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s much-criticized approach to China amid Covid-19 ("his intention could have been to get China to cooperate more closely”) and questioned whether the US will really exit the WHO over it, as President Trump has promised: “the U.S. President is not omnipotent—there is still Congress in Washington, after all,” Brundtland said. “Besides, there will be an election in half a year.”

As for Europe’s handling of the pandemic, Brundtland said she “was a little surprised that the reactions were so slow all over Europe.” Information about Covid-19 may have developed slowly, but there were early signs that it was being transmitted between humans. “Europe made mistakes, too. Apparently, many of the people responsible were very optimistic about the efficiency of their healthcare system. And they obviously underestimated how contagious the new coronavirus is.”

And a future pandemic could be even worse than this one, Brundtland warned, arguing that air travel, in particular, needs new policies to keep deadly viruses from spreading around the world so quickly.

How Epidemiologists Are Feeling About All This

When do you imagine you’ll feel safe attending a dinner party? Bringing in mail without precautions? Getting a haircut? Traveling by airplane? The New York Times asked these—the questions of our era—of 511 epidemiologists to gauge how they’re personally approaching Covid-19 and the risk-avoidance lifestyle.

The results were somewhat encouraging: 64% said they’d feel fine bringing in mail without precautions this summer; 60% would see a doctor for a nonurgent appointment before fall. Pluralities said it wouldn’t be until later in the next year, three to 12 months from now, that they’d feel safe doing things like eating in a restaurant, attending a dinner party, sending their kids to school, or going to the gym. Pluralities said they’d wait a year or more to attend a wedding or funeral, hug or shake hands when greeting a friend, or attend a religious service. Attending a sporting event, concert, or play ranked last among things they’d feel safe doing, with 64% saying they wouldn’t for a year or more.

For epidemiologists, as for the rest of us, it’s about tradeoffs between Covid-19 and other kinds of well-being, like mental health and children’s development at school, camp, or day-care, the Times’ Margot Sanger-Katz, Claire Cain Miller, and Quoctrung Bui note. Recent PhD Melissa Sharp “said she’d consider dating after a period of confinement,” they write. “‘I’m young and single, and a gal can only last so long in the modern world,’ she said. For Robert A. Smith of the American Cancer Society, a haircut might be worth the risk: ‘It really is a trade-off between risky behavior and seeing yourself in the mirror with a mullet.’”