Tag Archive for: Coronavirus

Coronavirus denial spreading on social media

As the Covid-19 crisis plays out across the world, a disturbing new form of denialism is emerging which seeks to sow doubt not just about the seriousness of the pandemic or the response to it, but about whether the virus exists at all.

Spurred on by conspiracy theorists and some right-wing media pundits, people using hashtags like ‘#filmyourhospitals’ and ‘#emptyhospitals’ are actively encouraging individuals to film hospitals and medical facilities—the implication being that, if hospitals appear quiet and calm from the outside, this ‘proves’ that the coronavirus crisis is being faked as part of a conspiracy to achieve some nefarious goal.

Google’s search trend data shows clearly the day the ‘empty hospitals’ narrative took off. The #filmyourhospitals hashtag was first tweeted on 29 March by a QAnon conspiracy theorist on Twitter. It was then amplified by others with large numbers of followers, including former congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero (whose Twitter account was recently retweeted by President Donald Trump).

‘Let’s get #FilmYourHospital trending’, Tesoriero wrote on 30 March in a Facebook post in which she questioned why two Los Angeles hospitals she’d visited appeared quiet. The post had been viewed more than 118,000 times as of 14 April.

 

 

The trend may have started with US-based QAnon conspiracy theorists, but its reach is growing by the day. Although most of the activity is still in the US, variants of the trend now exist in multiple countries and in multiple languages. Even when hospitals are clearly busy and filming captures people being wheeled in on stretchers, patients are dismissed as ‘crisis actors’ staging the scene for the media.

What sets #filmyourhospitals and #emptyhospitals apart from other conspiracy hashtags is that they are actively seeking to encourage real-world action—people have indeed been going out and filming hospitals. A multitude of videos across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube show individuals driving by hospitals, sitting in carparks and even walking into facilities and hassling medical workers.

This is worrying for a range of reasons. It poses significant concerns for the physical safety and privacy of both patients and healthcare workers. Many of the individuals participating in this growing social movement may not be especially well-adjusted, to put it mildly, and any trend which encourages suspicious and in some cases potentially aggressive individuals to hang around filming medical facilities and harassing staff during a pandemic is troubling.

The trend also risks undermining the effectiveness of health responses on several levels. Having people moving between multiple medical facilities to film them, as some individuals are, obviously carries a direct risk that those individuals will themselves spread Covid-19, especially if they don’t believe the virus exists and aren’t following social-distancing practices.

Their actions pose a much broader risk to achieving the kind of widespread compliance with regulations which is crucial to containing the virus. People who don’t believe the virus is real won’t support or accept the kind of radical changes to daily life and social interactions which we are all now having to come to terms with.

Parsing exactly what these individuals believe and why they believe it will be a complex process (there is never just one version of a conspiracy theory), and it’s likely that multiple strains of QAnon, anti-vaxxer and anti-New World Order conspiracy groups are active on these hashtags. Understanding the variations of the conspiracy is probably less important in the short term than simply getting on top of this trend before it spreads further and causes real damage.

Social media platforms could make a major contribution by removing any content containing the hashtags #emptyhospitals and #filmyourhospitals. This would not be enough to quash it entirely—as is always the case, some users would find ways around the ban—but it would at least help to reduce the spread.

More broadly, governments and health authorities need to be aware that there are growing pockets of coronavirus denialism within their communities. The fight against Covid-19 has often been referred to as a war with an invisible enemy; as bizarre as it may seem, part of the battle, at least when it comes to some groups, may be simply convincing them that there even is an enemy.

A global Covid-19 exit strategy

The world that emerges from the coronavirus pandemic may be a warring collection of countries that are more closed off and nationalistic than before. But without rapid and effective global cooperation, the world may not exit this crisis safely at all.

For now at least, heavy-handed nationalist responses dominate. Alongside curfews, lockdowns and requisitioning, governments are closing borders and using wartime rhetoric to rally their populations. Global supply chains and trade are being disrupted not just by lockdowns, but also by wealthy countries’ competition for supplies.

At some point, however, governments will need to restart the global economy. And that will require international cooperation in several key areas.

The first crucial element of a Covid-19 exit strategy is massive testing (for both infection and immunity), so that healthy people can return to work and those who are infected can get appropriate treatment. Countries will need adequate supplies of testing kits and protective equipment, as well as ventilators and access to emerging treatments.

International cooperation is vital to enabling mass testing and treatment. A primary supplier of the swabs used for collecting nasopharyngeal samples, Copan, is based in northern Italy. The reagents used to extract virus RNA from collected cells are produced mainly by Qiagen, a German company with a complex global supply chain. And foreign companies make roughly half of the ventilators in the United States; one-third come from Europe.

And yet, while governors of US states are bidding against one another for scarce ventilators, some European governments are barring their export. And a British government minister has said that the country’s inability to source necessary reagents is slowing down testing.

The solution is to increase cooperation in production and distribution, using global supply chains as effectively as possible, and pooling resources and equipment so that they can be allocated as the need for them shifts from one country to another. China, for example, is now donating ventilators to New York and exporting masks.

A second component of an exit strategy is effective disease surveillance and control. True, many countries are baulking at online surveillance of the sort used in China and South Korea. But with manual contact-tracing being too time-consuming, it’s hard to envisage an exit strategy that doesn’t include apps for this purpose.

Indeed, a new study by researchers at the University of Oxford suggests that tracing apps can be effective in reducing infection rates, even when just 60% of the population adopts them. Western societies therefore need to learn from the experiences of China and South Korea and balance fears of ramping up their own governments’ surveillance capacity against the harm people suffer from being kept in lockdown.

Hesitant countries should cooperate fast to adapt surveillance tools to the need to protect civil rights. This will require transparent oversight, clear principles of fairness (including equal access and treatment), robust data protection and audits of the algorithms used.

Third, a global Covid-19 exit strategy would be safest with an effective vaccine. Fortunately, international scientific cooperation is accelerating progress towards developing one. Researchers in China, the US and Europe are sharing viral genome sequences, while doctors from Harvard University, China’s Xijing Hospital and northern Italy are working on treatments, and top virologists are sharing findings on World Health Organization conference calls and placing them in online archives such as medRxiv and bioRxiv.

International cooperation will also be required to ensure that a vaccine is deployed globally. In recent weeks, Chinese authorities have reported new cases of Covid-19 that have been ‘imported’ from other countries, while some experts in Europe and North America are already anticipating a second wave of the virus.

Here, history is instructive. Although vaccinations enabled most wealthy countries to eliminate smallpox by the late 1940s, the disease kept returning from outside their borders. It took a worldwide effort launched by the WHO to eradicate smallpox globally by 1978.

There’s also a need for an early-warning system to detect the emergence of new or mutated viruses. As South Korea has shown, an early Covid-19 warning enables a government to react rapidly by ramping up testing and engaging the whole population in contact-tracing and containment, thereby potentially reducing the economic and social costs of an outbreak.

But early warnings require governments to tell the world about novel infections as soon as they discover them, which can be a sensitive matter. Countries need assurances that reporting disease outbreaks won’t expose them to instant punishment in the form of unnecessary travel and trade restrictions, and that any such measures would be introduced cooperatively.

The world should have learned this lesson during the SARS and Ebola epidemics of the past two decades. Travel and trade restrictions imposed by 40 countries impeded the reporting of Ebola outbreaks, hindering the global response. Similarly, China’s experience with SARS may have left its leaders less inclined to notify the outside world about the Covid-19 outbreak. Once they did, countries closed their borders in ways that contradicted WHO guidance. After this crisis is over, governments will need to bolster the early-warning system, on the understanding that this requires a cooperative quid pro quo.

Finally, the faster and more effectively we act to contain the spread of the virus in the world’s poorest and most populous countries, the better we can protect everyone. This requires urgent investments in prevention that also depend on cooperation—including via the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the International Monetary Fund’s emergency financing (which more than 90 countries have so far requested) and the World Bank’s emergency health support.

The Covid-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented threat to both public health and the global economy. Only by ditching nationalist rhetoric and policies, and embracing stronger international cooperation, can governments protect the people they claim to represent.

China’s Covid-19 charm offensive isn’t fooling India

There’s a war of narratives being fought between China and much of the rest of the world about how the Covid-19 pandemic began and who’s responsible. Beijing has embarked on a misinformation campaign to try to erase its tracks and absolve itself of guilt by directing the blame onto other nations, especially the United States.

China’s friendly diplomatic overtures to India are part of that effort, and are intended to persuade New Delhi to support Beijing’s confected version of how and where the disease originated. So far, India has played along.

The Indian government hasn’t publicly blamed any nation for causing the pandemic, though it has matter-of-factly acknowledged that the first case was reported in China. But that reflects typical Indian foreign policy behaviour rather than indicating any agreement with Beijing.

Until a fortnight ago, relations between China and India were less than harmonious, particularly after the frostiness that followed China’s advocacy on Pakistan’s behalf over the Kashmir issue at the United Nations last August.

In December 2019, New Delhi expelled a Chinese ‘research vessel’ from its waters near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Early this year, India seized from a Chinese ship bound for Pakistan an industrial autoclave that it believed could be used to build long-range ballistic missiles and satellite launch rockets.

Then China again raised the Kashmir issue at the January meetings of the UN Security Council, adding to New Delhi’s chagrin.

But now we’re seeing a new modus operandi between Beijing and New Delhi.

During a conversation with Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar last month, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi raised the issue of what the novel coronavirus was being called. India agreed not to call it the ‘China virus’.

Over the past fortnight, the Chinese government and China-based businesses such as Alibaba and TikTok have offered assistance to India in the form of medical supplies, testing kits and even makeshift hospitals, most which New Delhi has accepted.

The Chinese foreign ministry released glowing statements of solidarity, including a message from President Xi Jinping marking the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations between India and China. China’s official media, known for its condescending tone in references to India, has been extolling the virtues of Sino-Indian friendship, notwithstanding occasional references to the perils of India’s democratic system of governance.

This change in Beijing’s approach to India is clearly directly linked to its campaign to change the Covid-19 narrative.

Beijing protested against India’s ban on travellers from China in early February and is reported to have delayed clearance of an Indian evacuation flight to land in Wuhan. And New Delhi’s medical assistance to China during the peak of the crisis in Wuhan wasn’t publicly acknowledged by Beijing at the time. The acknowledgement of India’s help came later, coinciding with New Delhi’s agreement not to blame China for the virus.

So, China is cranking up the charm offensive. But that’s not to say that India is buying into the Chinese narrative or that it’s ignorant of Beijing’s real motives. Several prominent commentators in New Delhi have criticised China for its role in the pandemic. The All India Bar Association has filed a complaint against China at the UN Human Rights Commission.

In a recent survey, 67% of Indians polled blamed China for the pandemic and 50% said they believed that calling it the ‘Chinese virus’ wasn’t racist.

Editorials in China’s Global Times are positioning China as ‘probably the only one [able] to help a country as populous as India’ and are warning against Indian media and individuals’ attempts to ‘stigmatise’ China. The newspaper is also emphasising the harm being caused to the Indian economy from the country’s inability during the government-imposed lockdown to export goods to China.

Despite Chinese pressure, however, India continues to act steadfastly in its own interests. The government didn’t shy away from trying to curb a full-blown crisis by promptly airlifting its citizens from Wuhan, placing travel bans on visitors from China, and even cancelling visas issued to Chinese citizens before 5 February.

China’s own travel bans and quarantining of entrants to China make it easier for New Delhi to resist criticism from Beijing. In contrast, Pakistan was pressured to resume its flights to and from China just three days after suspending them in early February.

At the same time, India sees merit in extending cooperation with other countries, most significantly within a ‘Quad-Plus’ setting, to collaborate on procuring medical supplies and equipment and developing a vaccine.

New Delhi has also attempted to resurrect the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation to fight the pandemic. India hopes, in the process, to reclaim its leadership in the region.

India seems to recognise that no single country can be the partner it needs. That’s a healthy instinct that comes from deep within Indian security and political culture.

But India continues to pay lip service to the strength of Sino-Indian ties, and its tactics have already begun to bear fruit. Last week, China refused to bring up the Kashmir issue at the UN, despite Pakistan’s requests.

India will continue to build a workable relationship with Beijing, extract benefits where it can, and refuse to participate in any initiative to name and shame China. At the same time, it will cooperate with regional partners to find solutions to the dual health and economic crises.

Strategic autonomy and multi-alignment are India’s default foreign policy settings; there’s no reason to believe New Delhi will diverge from them in this case.

Supply chain security: lessons from Australia’s defence industry

In the viral outbreak of prognosticating about what the future beyond coronavirus should look like, there’s virtual unanimity about the need for countries to have supplies of essential items at the ready for crises. To be sure, US tech companies had already begun to ‘decouple’ their supply chains from China, but the global shortages of medical supplies, from face masks to ventilators, has amplified concerns about continuing with business as usual.

Whether out of concern that China could exploit its status as a virtual monopoly supplier, or concern that the just-in-time supply chains that are a feature of modern globalised trade can’t cope with surge demand in crises, there are widespread calls to diversify suppliers and, if necessary, bring manufacturing back onshore.

The latter won’t necessarily be easy. The recent history of the Australian defence industry illustrates the challenges of trying to ‘onshore’ essential manufacturing when dealing with relatively small quantities in extremely competitive global markets.

The government released its defence industry policy statement in early 2016 as part of the defence white paper. Its goal was to improve the delivery of defence capability, particularly in high-priority areas where ensuring supply and thereby sovereign capability are essential. Since then, the policy has been driven by a broad range of measures, including a willingness to pay more for local manufacture to increase Australian industry capability and content.

Yet while there have been individual success stories, particularly in advanced technology, at the macro level there has been virtually no increase (table 3.6) in the ratio of defence acquisition dollars spent locally to those going overseas.

There are reasons for this. Modern military equipment is extremely complex and therefore difficult and expensive to develop. Australia doesn’t have the ability to design and build military aircraft, for example, so they must be bought overseas. That won’t change. But even equipment built here still relies on high-value, imported subsystems. For example, at least four of the five major subsystems for the future submarine will be provided by overseas suppliers. It’s likely to be a similar situation in other sectors such as complex medical equipment, although Australia could build on a rich history of innovation in medical technology.

That reliance on supply chains can cause disruption. Despite being designed and built in Australia, the Hawkei protected vehicle recently endured nearly a year’s production delay when its Austrian engine supplier went into insolvency. This is the kind of risk that the US’s efforts to decouple from China are trying address, but it will be harder for an economy the size of Australia’s with a much smaller industrial base.

Moreover, even if we can manufacture to meet normal demand there’s an additional cost in maintaining idle surge capacity. The Australian National Audit Office reported that from 1999 to 2015, the Department of Defence paid $526 million for munitions produced by facilities in Mulwala and Benalla, but it spent a further $1.9 billion building, operating and maintaining the facilities to keep the industrial capability ready for possible war.

A key lesson from defence industry is we can’t do everything. But deciding what to prioritise and how to work with industry to ensure local supply is difficult. It took two years after the initial defence industry policy statement for the department to identify 10 priority areas for defence industry, and another two years later it has released detailed implementation plans for only two of those areas. Defence is likely not the only government department that will need to rebuild its ability to conduct industrial planning.

In some ways, the challenges in defence industry are simpler than in the broader economy. In the defence sector a monopsony-monopoly (or near monopoly) relationship rules, in which a single customer works with a very small number of suppliers. As a single customer, the government can decide what it’s willing to pay a premium for to ensure its priority capabilities are delivered.

That model may map reasonably neatly onto the healthcare sector for high-value equipment, such as ventilators, if the government is able to decree that all hospitals must source them locally from identified suppliers. But it’s unlikely to work for items with a broader market. How long will Australians be willing to buy Australian-made face masks if they can get them for a fraction of the price from overseas manufacturers? While Australians may expect their government to buy locally, they generally apply other value criteria than just ‘made in Australia’ when it comes to their own money. So it’s possible that local manufacturers of face masks, hand sanitiser and surgical gloves that are set up in the immediate wake of the Covid-19 crisis will follow the trajectory of the Australian car industry.

Of course, domestic manufacture isn’t the only way to address the problem, but other solutions are not sure fixes either. Diversifying supply may mitigate the risk of a monopoly supplier abusing its power, but it doesn’t address the issue of lean, just-in-time supply chains; manufacturers in India or Southeast Asia have no more incentive to keep huge stocks ready for a future rainy day than Chinese ones do.

Onshore stockpiling will require a change in mindset. Australian governments generally dislike paying for large stocks of essential supplies that sit idle, even if they are important to national security. For example, due to the high cost of modern guided munitions, Defence’s stocks are unlikely to last for more than a few days of conventional warfighting. And despite repeated warnings of the parlous state of our fuel reserves that sit well below the International Energy Agency’s benchmarks, the government has shown little appetite to invest in infrastructure to store increased onshore reserves, preferring to sign a deal with Washington giving access to US reserves. Whether such arrangements will be robust enough in future crises remains to be seen—in the current crisis, with its own states fighting for access to national reserves, the US hasn’t been able to provide other countries with medical supplies.

That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. The fourth industrial revolution offers hope for small but technologically advanced nations such as Australia. But the example of defence industry shows that if Australia wants more resilient supply chains that can be guaranteed to provide essential items when the next crisis hits, it will take planning, prioritisation and an ongoing willingness from governments, the private sector and the public to endure higher costs. That will be a significant departure from our current business-as-usual model and require a commitment that must endure well beyond the shock of the current crisis.

Like Spanish flu, Covid-19 will hit the poor the hardest

Horror videos posted on social media last week of residents of the Ecuadorian coastal metropolis of Guayaquil abandoning corpses in the streets while vultures circled overhead underline the extreme vulnerability of emerging nations to the novel coronavirus.

Media coverage has presented it as a largely developed-nation pandemic. Iran is shown as the only emerging nation where it has run out of control; however, that simply reflects the paucity of data elsewhere.

A new study led by an eminent US economist, Harvard’s Robert Barro, shows the same was true during the Spanish flu 100 years ago: the poorest were hit the hardest.

Australia, by contrast, stands out both during the Spanish flu and today with the coronavirus as one of the least affected nations.

The global coronavirus data collected by the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore shows that only 0.8% of the observed cases in Australia are resulting in death, compared with 12.6% in Italy, 11% in the United Kingdom and 3.2% in the United States.

The only nations with lower fatality rates than Australia are Singapore, at 0.4%, the United Arab Emirates, at 0.5%, Israel and South Africa, both at 0.7%, and the small populations of Qatar, Iceland and Bahrain where rates are 0.3%, 0.4% and 0.6%, respectively.

The fatality rate among observed cases varies, depending on the extent of testing and identification of cases in the community. Johns Hopkins shows the same pattern is seen when looking at fatality rates across the entire community. It’s 0.18 per 100,000 people in Australia, compared with 28.3 in Italy, 9.3 in the UK and 3.9 in the US.

While some estimates suggest that the Spanish flu infected a third of the global population, the study by Barro characterises that figure as ‘speculative’ and says the fatality rate across the community is a more reliable figure. Barro used estimates of flu deaths from the countries that recorded them, and measured the increase in the death rate between 1918 and 1920 for countries that did not (after making allowance for World War l).

The study confirms the widely held proposition that the flu killed more than the war in total; however, that wasn’t the case for the main combatant nations, including Australia. The flu deaths were concentrated in poor nations.

Based on data from 43 nations, the study shows 39 million died from the flu, or 2.0% of the world population. Estimates of World War l deaths vary, but the study says the most reliable figure is 6.2 million direct combat-related military deaths.

Australia missed out entirely on the first wave of the Spanish flu in 1918, thanks to its strong maritime quarantine measures. It was affected by the waves that followed in subsequent years, but the overall fatality rate was only 0.3% in Australia, which was among the lowest. This compared with 1.1% of the population being killed during the war.

Germany lost 2.7% of its population during the war compared with 0.8% to the Spanish flu, while the comparable numbers for the UK were 1.4% during the war and 0.5% to the flu.

The Spanish flu hit hardest in India, where it killed 5.2% of the population, and South Africa ,where 3.4% died. Other nations with elevated rates included Indonesia (3%), Mexico (2.1%), Russia (1.9%) and China (1.4%). With their large populations, India accounted for 43% of all deaths and China 21%.

Scaled up to today’s population, the mortality rate from the Spanish flu would translate to 150 million deaths, vastly more than the 82,000 deaths recorded from coronavirus so far.

As the reports from Ecuador last week illustrate, the actual deaths from coronavirus are running at a much higher rate than the official figures, which, in Ecuador’s case, show only 3,995 cases and 220 dead. The Guardian cited a regional politician saying 480 death certificates were issued in a single day in Guayaquil last week, while President Lenin Moreno announced that 2,000 cardboard coffins were being issued.

The crowded cities of the emerging world, such as Lagos, Cairo, Sao Paulo, Manila, Jakarta, Mumbai, Dhaka and Karachi, are highly vulnerable, despite the very low reported cases from these locations so far. Nigeria, for example, has reported 254 cases and six deaths, while Bangladesh says it has 164 cases and 17 deaths.

Governments are ordering quarantines in many emerging nations, but they cannot be effective when people are living cheek by jowl in shanty towns such as those of Mumbai, Sao Paulo or Manila. In the absence of any social safety net, people are compelled to work if they are to eat.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan commented on Twitter a few days ago: ‘In the subcontinent, with a high rate of poverty, we are faced with the stark choice of having to balance between a lockdown necessary to slow down/prevent the spread of COVID19 & ensuring people don’t die of hunger & our economy doesn’t collapse. So we are walking a tightrope.’

Not only is the emerging world most exposed to the health impact, but it’s also the most vulnerable to the economic effects of the crisis. Barro’s paper said that during the Spanish flu, economies suffered a contraction of around 3% for every percentage point increase in the mortality rate. India’s economic output, for example, fell 15% between 1916 and 1918.

According to the Institute for International Finance, global investors already pulled US$61 billion out of emerging economies in the first three months of the year, which is double the capital withdrawal at the peak of the global financial crisis.

Countries like Indonesia, Turkey, Argentina and South Africa with current account deficits and large US dollar debts are the most exposed to the capital flight, with financial instability likely to develop there.

At war with a virus

US President Donald Trump has labelled himself a wartime president, and many other leaders around the world are using similar language. It’s a description that raises an obvious question: what do the history and nature of war tell us about fighting a virus?

While war should normally be a policy of last resort, not confronting an enemy that is determined to attack and poses an imminent threat can be deadly. Indeed, the enemy morphed from a local outbreak in Wuhan into a global pandemic precisely because the Chinese authorities squandered precious weeks before confronting it. China’s leadership initially covered up the outbreak and allowed millions of people to leave Wuhan even though many carried the virus with them.

The United States also manifested a widespread initial reluctance to go to war. This comes as little surprise. War as a last resort is one of the tenets of the ‘just war’ theory, the body of thinking that emerged in the Middle Ages and was intended to make wars less common and less violent.

The problem, though, is that it takes two to avoid conflict, and the virus was determined to bring it on. Putting off the decision to go on the offensive against Covid-19—treating a war of necessity as a war of choice—has proved extraordinarily costly in terms of lives lost and economic destruction.

Once leaders recognised that war was necessary, they soon realised they had no weapons. A vaccine is an estimated 12–18 months off. Antiviral drugs could be available sooner, but they, too, won’t come soon. As former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, ‘You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.’ This is a war that must be fought for the foreseeable future in ways designed to frustrate the enemy rather than defeat it.

The best tactic available now is dispersion, to offer the enemy fewer targets. Relatively weak militaries often employ this method by avoiding set-piece battles against stronger forces. Dispersion, in today’s parlance, means social distancing.

The problem is that social distancing was postponed in many countries or is being applied unevenly. It’s often said that speed kills; when it comes to heading off or limiting pandemics, it’s delay that kills. The countries that have fared best against the coronavirus so far, like South Korea and Singapore, acted quickly and decisively.

This war is also being waged with a lack of defensive equipment. One of the most important tasks is to identify those who have been infected and trace their contacts. Both groups need to be isolated quickly. This is the only way to understand the threat, to break through what the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz is credited with calling the ‘fog of war’.

But the testing needed to identify those who are infected is simply not of sufficient quality or available in sufficient quantity in most countries. Closing borders can be helpful (particularly early on, before the virus becomes widespread in a society), but it is no panacea. Similarly, mass testing to reveal who has developed immunity to the virus, which is essential for people to be able to gather safely, whether for work or play, is not yet available.

The strategy must be to play for time until we are equipped to attack Covid-19 with antiviral drugs or, better yet, a vaccine. Dispersion and testing are needed to accomplish this.

The last question is when to end the war. Trump and many of his counterparts around the globe are understandably in a hurry to restart their economies. We and they must have the discipline not to rush. We need to fight a holding action on the economic front by providing relief to workers and businesses, until the war on the virus is mostly won and recovery can begin in earnest. Terminating the war too soon will only extend its duration and increase its cost.

Much of the world entered this war in a condition close to unilateral disarmament. That can never happen again. Countries must maintain stockpiles of protective gear and medical equipment, increase resources devoted to ‘peacetime’ research and development of relevant therapies, and rehearse responses to a pandemic at all levels of government. Too many doctors, nurses, first-responders, police and fire personnel—those working on the front lines—are being sent into battle without armour. And too many casualties lack access to the medical care all of us need them to have.

Countries also need to embrace joint action. Just as one builds coalitions to fight conventional wars, allies are needed to fight pandemics. We will need to enlist others to respect rules and meet standards when it comes to reporting, fighting and containing infectious disease outbreaks. And richer countries will need to come together to strengthen poorer countries’ public health capacities, not just for humanitarian reasons, but also out of self-interest. We are only as strong as the weakest among us.

This war should not have surprised us. It was predictable and it was predicted. Pandemics are not black swans; they are baked into the cake of globalisation. And they can start anywhere. This time it was Wuhan. Next time it could be Wichita.

And there will be a next time, if not Covid-20, then perhaps Covid-21 or some other pathogen. Borders and sovereignty can be breached; little stays local for long. The challenge is to be ready so that an outbreak does not become a pandemic, and a pandemic does not become a catastrophe.

Beyond the pandemic

The Australian government is properly focused on managing the domestic effects of Covid-19. But we must also think about a changing external environment.

Middle powers are not generally prime movers in major international shifts, tending rather to react to changes wrought by others. But that is no reason for policy stasis.

The government is right in thinking in the short term about our Pacific neighbours and Timor-Leste. As the major external power, we have a moral requirement to assist these countries, as well as a strategic interest is doing so.

We would, however, be making a mistake if we focused our resources solely in the immediate neighbourhood at the expense of Southeast Asia—above all, Indonesia—claiming that domestic imperatives preclude help.

During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Prime Minister John Howard provided $1 billion in standby credits to Indonesia. After the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, he also decided that Australia should give $1 billion in a recovery package to that country.

Howard was right. The stability of Southeast Asia, and particularly Indonesia, is a paramount Australian national interest.

Indonesia is now facing a crisis of the same dimension as those of 1997 and 2004–05. Prime Minister Scott Morrison should respond with the same far-sightedness and seek to have others—notably Japan, South Korea and the United States—act similarly.

Doubtless, there will be little appetite in government for such actions in Southeast Asia.

But even were we commit an additional $4 billion to both the South Pacific and Southeast Asia over two years in both grants and soft loans, in ballpark terms that would still be less than 2% of what we have committed domestically to counter Covid-19 so far and about the same in real terms as the sum of our two earlier emergency commitments to Indonesia alone. If the Morrison government, like Howard’s before it, were to explain its reasoning in terms of the Australian national interest, it is a fair bet that Australians would accept it.

Looking to the medium term, there’s a human tendency in times of crisis to see everything changing. Not so. We still need to trade and invest. Military tensions will continue in Europe and the South China Sea. International institutions will not vanish. People will worry about climate change.

But the adages that history accelerates in times of crisis have validity. American soft power, already squandered under Trump, has ebbed ferociously in recent weeks. The divisions between China and the United States have deepened.

The global trend towards nationalism has intensified. The relevance of international institutions is increasingly questioned. What have the G7 and G20 done? What has happened to the UN Security Council?

Australia must recognise, not just intellectually but emotionally, that our US security shield is not enough.

American resilience has been underestimated in the past and could be again. Nonetheless we have seriously to think beyond our security blanket of a dominant United States presence in the region and more towards common regional approaches to constrain and balance China. This is no easy task given the different interests of the main players and the internal dynamics of some of them, such as India. But we have to make that adjustment in our strategic thinking.

And weak multilateral structures are not a reason to avoid multilateralism. Covid-19 should not be allowed further to weaken multilateral institutions, but must rather stimulate efforts to repair them.

While Australians rightly decry the sclerotic nature of many multilateral institutions, we should remember that small and middle powers need rules more than big ones. We particularly need a good trading system. We should as a national priority work where we have most influence, namely with like-minded democracies and regional friends, to repair the authority of global and regional institutions, the better to serve the post-Covid-19 world.

Few serious thinkers risk forecasting where Covid-19 will leave us in the longer term—say, a decade hence. As former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai is alleged (inaccurately) to have said on the impact of the French Revolution, ‘It is too early to tell.’

When the Soviet Union collapsed, we didn’t foresee the rise of Vladimir Putin. The pundits didn’t guess that the global financial crisis presaged a Donald Trump presidency or Brexit. Americans didn’t imagine that 20 years after 9/11, their troops would still be in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the Covid-19 crisis will have its own unique chain reaction, probably a massive one. The world will be different. If we as a nation are to deal effectively with the coming global changes, our leadership will have to put the same policy grunt, political energy and resources into our international dealings as into our domestic challenges.

The politics of the pandemic

Just as all politics is local, so Canberra is ever about politics (it’s the whole reason the place was built).

Pandemic has smashed into Australia’s capital, remaking the dynamic and direction of politics. Normal politics has ceased. Amazing political consensus has arrived. It won’t last, but it’s still amazing.

Covid-19 is changing the way Canberra does what it does, shifting lots of big p-words: power, policy and long-held political positions.

Parliament House has closed its doors to the public ‘indefinitely’, but the meaning of the pandemic flows through the building ceaselessly—especially out the back in the executive wing.

After cancelling all parliamentary sittings until August, the government has had to call a one-day session on Wednesday to legislate more big bucks for the battle against coronavirus.

Closing parliament for five months causes less popular angst than closing pubs. Even in amazing times, it’s politically unhealthy that a health crisis renders parliament a non-essential service.

Australia’s democracy is so robust that the House of Representatives overthrew a government in the midst of World War II and the war effort didn’t miss a beat. Not long after parliament remade the government, US General Douglas MacArthur saw the House of Reps in action and observed with a grin: ‘If the men of Australia fight as well as they argue, this war is won.’ MacArthur had been seated beside the speaker on the floor of the chamber during a vigorous evening debate, held after a formal dinner lubricated with liquid stronger than lemonade.

Such history advises that a pandemic won’t put Oz politics into hibernation for long. The greatest emergency shakeup of how Australia lives and works since World War II means there’ll be much to argue about.

Bad things change nations—wars, economic depressions and pandemics. And the war against the virus will push Australia towards depression.

The recession that’s about to hit Australia will drive politics long after we get a vaccine for Covid-19.

Many Australians now in the middle of their careers have never known recession, because of an ‘unprecedented stretch of economic growth’—a world record—since ‘the recession we had to have’ in 1991. Another of those ‘had to have’ moments has arrived, wearing a face mask, as The Economist noted:

The bushfires that raged through December and January could not stop it. Nor could a recent fall in house prices, a slump in iron-ore prices in 2014, the global financial crisis or the dotcom bust of 2001. But covid-19 seems likely to do what none of these other setbacks could: interrupt Australia’s unbeaten run of over 28 years without a recession.

The length and depth of the recession will be what matters politically. To get a short, shallow recession, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has abruptly killed the Liberal political mantra: ‘budget deficit, bad; budget surplus, good.

Like toilet paper and hand sanitiser disappearing from supermarket shelves, the much-anticipated surplus is whisked away by the emergency that demands constant washing of hands. We’re all Keynesians now.

In three frantic weeks, the government has announced spending measures worth $200 billion. To support financial markets, the Reserve Bank and the Office of Financial Management will throw in a further $105 billion. Combined, those measures are equivalent to about 16% of GDP.

Stuff that would have been delusional in January becomes a must-do in March and a done deal in April.

The Commonwealth takes control of 657 private hospitals? Done!

Free child care? Done!

As you try to get your head around a Liberal government nationalising (temporarily) large swathes of the economy, more amazing stuff arrives.

A deal with the unions to simplify industrial awards and save jobs? Done!

As Attorney-General Christian Porter observed, ‘There’s been the type of change in three weeks inside the award system that you might otherwise wait 30 years to see.’

Savour a Liberal government waxing warm about full cooperation from the trade unions that are the foundation of the Labor Party.

In the words of the ABC’s Annabel Crabb: ‘Every day that passes brings a new wonder.’

Emergency measures apply only as long as the crisis lasts. Yet, as a classic political quote attributed to former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel advises: ‘You never let a serious crisis go to waste.’

Beyond the infection curve, Canberra’s timeline is set by a remorseless three-year election cycle.

Morrison won his ‘miracle’ election on 18 May 2019. That means he’ll be seeking his next miraculous performance at a half-Senate and House of Representatives poll that must be held between 7 August 2021 and 21 May 2022.

The Morrison government won’t face the people next year. Wager that Australia’s next federal election will be held on that last possible day, 21 May 2022, allowing time for three more budgets.

The first will be the 2020 budget now pushed from May to October. The second budget, in 2021, would normally happen in May, but recession uncertainty might push it to later in the year. The third, in 2022, will repeat the budget-and-election formula that worked so well for Morrison last year: bring down an ‘early’ budget in April to launch the campaign for a May poll.

In two years, Morrison will be bringing down the budget before pivoting immediately to an election campaign. He has just 24 months to deal with pandemic and recession, then start the rebuild. Make or break.

The prime minister describes times both troubled and transformed:

There is a new normal here in Australia and it is one that we now need to get used to and settle into for that haul over the next 6 months. That is something that will go against the grain for so many, but we adapt. We can change the way we live, but it doesn’t change who we are.

For now, Morrison says, there are no red teams or blue teams. Australia comes together to confront a powerful enemy.

When red and blue politics resume, the terrain will be much altered. Old arguments will have less force. New thoughts will take hold. Amazing times.

China and America are failing the pandemic test

Covid-19 is confronting humanity with its most severe test since 1918, when an influenza pandemic killed more people than died in World War I. Yet the leaders of the world’s two largest economies, China and the United States, have failed the first round.

The initial reaction of both Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump was denial. Crucial time for testing and containment was wasted, and opportunities for international cooperation were squandered.

After costly national lockdowns, the two leaders engaged in propaganda battles with each other. China’s foreign ministry blamed the US military for the emergence of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, and Trump called it the ‘Chinese virus’. Yet Covid-19 doesn’t care about the nationality of the humans it kills, and no global response will succeed without some degree of cooperation between the US and China.

Bilateral relations were already deteriorating rapidly when the virus hit. Trump’s 2017 national security strategy focused on great-power competition with China. Many Americans of both major political parties agree that Trump was correct to punish China for cybertheft of intellectual property, coerced intellectual property transfer, and unfair trade practices such as subsidised credit to state-owned enterprises.

Reciprocity does need to be enforced. If China can ban Google and Facebook from its market for security reasons, the US can take similar steps against Huawei and ZTE. Anger and mistrust fester in both countries’ capitals.

But what the Covid-19 crisis teaches us is that this competitive approach to national security is inadequate. And Covid-19 isn’t the only example. The information revolution and globalisation are changing world politics dramatically.

While trade wars have set back economic globalisation, environmental globalisation, reflected in pandemics and climate change, obeys the laws of biology and physics, not politics. In a world where borders are becoming more porous to everything from drugs and illicit financial flows to infectious diseases and cyber terrorism, countries must use their soft power of attraction to develop networks and institutions that address the new threats.

As technology expert Richard Danzig points out, ‘Pathogens, AI systems, computer viruses, and radiation that others may accidentally release could become as much our problem as theirs. Agreed reporting systems, shared controls, common contingency plans, norms, and treaties must be pursued as means of moderating our numerous mutual risks.’ Tariffs and border walls cannot solve these problems.

On transnational issues like Covid-19 and climate change, power becomes a positive-sum game. It is not enough to think of power over others; one must also consider power with others. On many transnational issues, empowering others helps a country accomplish its own goals. For example, all can benefit if others improve their energy efficiency or their public health systems.

All leaders have a responsibility to put their country’s interests first, but the important moral question is how broadly or narrowly they choose to define those interests. Both China and the US are responding to Covid-19 with an inclination towards short-term, zero-sum, competitive approaches, and too little attention to international institutions and cooperation. As I show in my new book, Do morals matter?, Trump has interpreted ‘America first’ too narrowly, stepping back from the long-term, enlightened self-interest that marked the post-1945 US approach designed by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

Cooperation is, however, possible between geopolitical and ideological rivals. For example, during the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union both supported a United Nations program that eradicated smallpox. After the 2002–03 SARS epidemic, the US and China established a web of cooperative relations between national health authorities, and they worked together to combat the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Attacks by new viruses can come in waves, and the second wave of the flu pandemic a century ago was more lethal than the first. There is much we don’t know about the new coronavirus. There could be seasonal surges between the northern and southern hemispheres. When the global north has a respite, the virus (or a mutation) may move south, and then spread northward again with the change in weather. In any case, we must be prepared for a multiyear battle, which will require sharing information, developing and producing therapies and vaccines, and manufacturing and distributing medical supplies and equipment.

The current Covid-19 crisis will continue to test US and Chinese leaders. To ensure they pass it, both sides should de-escalate the propaganda wars that sow mistrust and inhibit cooperation, and articulate the importance of ‘power with’ rather than ‘over’ others. They should plan for future waves of the virus and establish bilateral and multilateral frameworks to enhance collaboration. And they should recognise that helping developing countries cope with Covid-19 is in everyone’s interest, because viral reservoirs anywhere will place people in jeopardy everywhere.

For both self-interested and humanitarian reasons, the US and China should announce generous contributions to a major new UN coronavirus fund that is open to all countries. And they should jointly lead the G20 in funding it.

Lastly, given how much humans still must learn from each other about this new virus, the US and China should restore the rich web of contacts among scientists and medical professionals that existed a decade ago. It would also be wise to form a binational high-level commission on Covid-19, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, to provide political cover and cut through bureaucratic red tape.

Chinese and American leaders botched the first round of their Covid-19 examination. But it’s not too late for them to learn how to do better.

Coordinated national and global responses needed to beat Covid-19

Black swan events produce big but unforeseen consequences. Was Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison right, even prescient, in his speech at the Lowy Institute on 3 October 2019? It’s hard to think of a better example of ‘negative globalism’ than the novel coronavirus that originated in the wet markets of Wuhan: it has circled the globe with astonishing speed, is still spreading and threatens to kill people in huge numbers and lay waste to major economies. The pathogen has insinuated itself into the interstices of global commerce and people movements through multi-country supply-cum-manufacturing chains, labour flows and tourism networks.

Clearly, a pandemic isn’t quite what Morrison had in mind, but rather international institutional arrangements. From that perspective, the current crisis, like the fires that blazed across eastern Australia last summer, reaffirms the importance of looking for solutions without passports to problems without passports.

The available data’s patchy, and the choice between watchful mitigation (Sweden) versus drastic suppression (UK, US) strategies is somewhat contested, but the media has been flooded with predictions that the pandemic will kill globalism. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan colourfully describes Covid-19 as ‘the hunter-killer enemy of globalisation’, arguing that the pandemic will strengthen the power of national governments at the expense of international institutions.

The death of globalisation and global institutions is much exaggerated. A universal pulling up of drawbridges behind national moats would do collective self-harm. The positing of national sovereignty and UN-centric multilateralism as alternatives is a false dichotomy. We need both strong state capacity, not power, at the national level and efficient and effective multilateralism for coordinating responses at the global level.

The appropriate state–global relationship is social distancing and mitigation policies nationally and functional collaboration across the geopolitical fault lines globally. Governments in thrall to neoliberal orthodoxy have hollowed out both state capacity and international institutions. The crisis Covid-19 brings home the urgent need to recast states as the locus of public goods and to empower international institutions to underpin a healthy global multilateral order as sites for facilitating cooperation and muting conflict.

Conversely, any intensification of aggressively nationalist, anti-globalist sentiments would pave the way for widely damaging economic and trade deglobalisation. US President Donald Trump’s strategy of decoupling from China, bringing companies home and rebuilding national manufacturing capacity may well be emulated by many countries that are now more willing to accept higher costs and less efficiency after Covid-19 exposed their vulnerabilities. Comparative advantage is all very well in good times, but single supply lines leave populations exposed when the bad times roll.

However, the crisis is a sharp reminder of the limits of unilateralism in an age of shared threats and fragility but unequal resilience. National adequacy measures must be supplemented by building international functional redundancy into food, health and value chains in a deliberate strategy of ‘risk reduction through diversification’. It’s in all countries’ self-interest to recreate a healthy rules-based international order that breaks down barriers to the free flow of medical supplies. ‘Solidarity is the new selfish’ because of this, writes Federica Mogherini, the former EU high representative for foreign affairs.

Trump’s disruption of the global trading order has made it correspondingly more difficult to organise a coordinated response to the pandemic or for the US to provide the requisite world leadership. The rushed retreat into ‘America first’ responses, like when Trump tried to buy exclusive access to vaccines produced in Germany, has forcefully demonstrated the consequences of the crumbling architecture of the global order. In a policy aptly described as ‘sicken thy neighbour’, 24 countries imposed restrictions, including outright bans in some cases, on exports of critical medical supplies such as masks, medicines, ventilators and disinfectants.

If every crisis is an opportunity, then this one should help to reboot the ethic of global cooperation. Tackling a pandemic requires cross-border good governance; robust surveillance to detect, test, isolate and treat every serious case; an unimpeded flow of medical equipment and supplies from manufacturers to affected countries; real-time intelligence sharing and exchanges of best practices; and an impartial, technically competent and publicly credible international organisation to establish universal health norms.

An efficient architecture of global health governance would have detected the emerging epidemiological threat early, sounded the alarm and coordinated the delivery of essential equipment and medicines to population clusters in the most need.

Measured against those benchmarks, the performance of the World Health Organization has been underwhelming. Its initial tardiness, and its indulgence of China’s official line and continuing ostracism of Taiwan, will dent its credibility and legitimacy as the world’s first line of defence against pandemics.

As the Trump administration receded still further from UN engagement, China put its nationals at the head of four of the UN’s 15 specialised agencies; the other permanent Security Council members, including the US, have just one each. Specialised agencies acting as technical watchdogs have been weakened by politicisation, donor capture and timid leadership. Member states, not the organisations themselves, are to blame for this pathology.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for global circuit-breakers to identify, isolate and quarantine systemic risks early. The Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data, a public–private partnership that includes the governments of Germany, Singapore and the US, might be a good forerunner of collaborative efforts to exchange information and share best practices. A group of Chinese researchers published the genetic sequence of the new virus online through the initiative in December.

When the 1987 Brundtland commission report said, ‘The Earth is one but the world is not’, hardcore realists dismissed that as a romantic notion. Yet the serial crises of the past few decades, from natural disasters to pandemics, from financial meltdowns to terrorism, remind us that no nation can be an island, sufficient unto itself, in the modern world.

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