No less a figure than Bill Gates expected the Covid-19 pandemic to look like a world War. The armistice came last week, on the fifth day of the fifth month, when the World Health Organization declared the official end of the emergency.
“Armistice”, I say, not victory, because a global death toll of tens of millions of victims does not constitute any kind of victory. The 1.1mn in the United States alone approximates that nation’s combined losses in all wars. The lucky ones among us (I never knowingly had the virus) need not cheer.
Beware of the opposite fallacy, though. Don’t discount, or take for granted, the West’s handling of a crisis that was unprecedented in the previous century or so. The WHO announcement is as good a starting point as any to make the point.
A Covid vaccine was expected to mock 18 months contrive. Some experts considered even that projection to be optimistic, as did much of the public. In fact, it arrived in half the time. If that was a scientific coup, the membership rate was a civic miracle. As late as September 2020, 49% of Americans said they did definitely or probably not uncover the arms for the jab. This reluctance was consistent with what we “knew” about modern voters: their distrust of authority, their weakness for online quackery. In the end, 82 percent of Americans received at least one dose. Apparently France was even more cynical about the vaccine, but also ended up with very high coverage.
The lockdown required equally unlikely levels of consent. This was perhaps the most profound peacetime foray into the private realm. If even one in four citizens challenged it, the policy would collapse, unless it is believed that the state can impose sanctions against a quarter of its population. The blockade was based on a degree of willful obedience, of submission to authority, which was considered bizarre in the populist era. Remember, the restrictions were actively popular. Before the pandemic, it was natural to worry about Western electorates rioting. There are now more reasons to wonder if they are too tame.
This whole discipline has been corrupted, the cynics will say. It is no patriotic hardship or sacrifice to stay at home when one’s income is underwritten by the state. Perhaps. But this economic support was itself another benevolent revelation of the pandemic. Who expected Washington, the most rancorous capital of the democratic world, to pass unanimously $2 trillion in tax cuts at that speed? Or Brexit-era Britain to institute a furlough scheme with so much technical thinking and political consensus behind it?
The surprises go beyond the pandemic itself to the Great Thaw in ordinary life. Global airfares are much higher compared to 2019, such is the question. Up to Transactions a Pret A Manger, that substitute measure of the urban economy, are almost at pre-pandemic levels in London’s financial district, already there in the West End and well above it in railway stations. It is true that office occupancy is steadily declining. But live sporting events, migration flows, tourism, the handshake: these things are back with a vengeance that deserves more reflection, if not wonder. Even I, on the bullish end of the debate, thought it would be 2025 before nightlife in a major western city felt like 2019. That mark was passed last spring.
Note the range of human feelings here: trust enough to take the vaccine, deference enough to stay home, trust enough to go out again. (Not to mention enough animal spirits to start new businesses.) The pandemic has been a complete test of, well, us.
Whether the West’s handling of the pandemic has been “good” is something that years of official inquiries will try to establish, and no doubt fail. They will try to number the lives that would have been saved with a faster closure of the borders. And figure out how vaccines could reach less developed countries faster. And ask if limiting attendance at the funeral is acceptable. The reckoning will also have to include the public: perhaps the violation of blockade rules was widespread, but hidden, just as opportunistic crime flourished under the “Blitz spirit” of 1940-41.
For now, all I ask is that you remember how low expectations of public life were in the years before the pandemic. The theme of the era was a misruling elite and an ungovernable people, each problem provoking the other in a Mobius cycle of civic dysfunction. There is a case, albeit a prima facie one, that the West has just experienced a rebuke to it all: a show of technocratic acumen and public conscientiousness. If future investigations bear it out, it will be hard not to paraphrase Jeane Kirkpatrick’s old joke. We have to face the truth about ourselves, no matter how pleasant it is.
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