BackOpinion | We must not rush to judge who wins or loses the corona battle
It’s pointless trying to replicate other models as we do not know what works best in which place
PremiumWe are barely four months into a full-blown covid-19 pandemic and already there is premature talk about which containment model works best. We have talked about the South Korean model (intervening fast, widespread testing), the Wuhan model (a total authoritarian lockdown), the German model (early tracing and isolation of infection clusters), the Swedish model (letting people go about their normal lives, but with care), the Singapore model (advance preparation, public education, strong isolation and hospitalization measures) and the New Zealand model (hard lockdown done early), among others.
Few have spoken of the Boris Johnson model, where the initial plan was to let the infection spread widely so that the population develops “herd immunity". Then there is the US non-model, where the president’s leadership has been poor, leaving individual states to do their own thing to cope with the crisis, from high-casualty New York to zero-lockdown states in the hinterland that never quite closed down. The US may yet give us mini-models to examine—both the ones that worked and those that didn’t—and the benefits (if any) of not doing much.
In India, we have talked about the Kerala model (strong contact tracing and regional lockdowns supported by decent healthcare), or even the Bhilwara model (where bureaucrats clamped down on specific localities).
Without denying the successes of various countries, or their states, what needs underlining is that it is too early to say that a particular model works best. For several reasons: one, the pandemic is far from over and we don’t know if escaping the first wave will help us with the second; two, the specific factors that helped a country stop covid’s spread may not be replicable elsewhere; three, the virus strains that infected various countries may be mutant, some less dangerous than others; four, we have made no adjustments for population demographics (age, ethnicity and vulnerability variations due to climate differences); five, state and societal responses have not been normalized for governance capacity, size of population, and degree of diversity in society.
Let’s take the New Zealand model, for example. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has earned a lot of plaudits for opting for a hard lockdown at an early stage in the pandemic. At the time of writing, over 1,200 of the nearly 1,400-plus people infected had recovered. The death count was no higher than 19. Full marks for the effort, but how replicable is this model used by an island nation where there are more sheep than people? How do we know that its success is not the result of its uniqueness?
Or take Sweden’s relaxed attitude to lockdowns. It earned a lot of praise from countries and economists who did not want a lockdown to decimate economic activity, but a closer examination suggests that the Swedish model was the unique result of one man’s assessment of the threat—its chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. He concluded that the infection would not spread from China, and that tracing individual infection cases would keep the nation safe without a lockdown. Politicians let him do his thing, as it absolves them of responsibility for anything going wrong. They could get away by saying that they don’t interfere with independent epidemic-containment institutions. But already the Swedish model is wearing thin. Death rates are much higher than in its Nordic neighbours, and critics are calling for harsher lockdowns to prevent more infections.
After its early “success", Singapore declared a lockdown earlier this month as infections spiked, and Japan announced a state of emergency to deal with the pandemic. Some media reports have also sought to draw gender-related conclusions from how countries have fared so far. Countries with women leadership at the top (Germany, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland) have apparently handled the pandemic much better. Again, there is absolutely no reason to doubt the leadership capabilities of the women concerned, but the law of causality runs both ways: women do make excellent leaders, but it is societies with a high degree of gender parity that enable women to rise to the top. It cannot be argued that the same societies, if they had men at the top, would have done worse, given their state capacities and higher standards of gender empowerment in general.
The key takeaway here is this: It is all right to flag best practices (more testing, rigorous contact-tracing, educating the public on reducing risks by wearing masks and maintaining physical distance from others), but there is no reason to suggest that any model is exemplary, or worth emulating elsewhere without ifs and buts.
What we should learn from these “models" is a simple reality: For the first time ever, we now have diverse natural experiments that will produce varying results in varying circumstances. When the pandemic is finally over (when we find a vaccine and a cure), we will be able to evaluate—after due research—which practices are widely replicable, and which ones are specific to a region, country or culture. Let us not declare one model a winner and another a loser prematurely just because the media is looking for heroes and villains.
R. Jagannathan is editorial director, ‘Swarajya’ magazine
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