How to Beat a Pandemic
Whether nations fare well or badly in the face of COVID-19 depends on a complicated patchwork of policies, climate, economics and more.
Every day, it seems, I see some news headline somewhere saying: “How [insert country name] became an unlikely winner in the pandemic / survived the pandemic without a lockdown / without devastating the economy / without a second wave / with only a single death….” Each story, it seems, provides one simple lesson for how to beat COVID-19.
People love it when a simple lesson can be drawn from a complex problem. That’s human nature. Especially at times when everything seems chaotic, distilling complex data into a simple message creates the illusion of control. It makes people feel better.
But the world is not so simple.
Today, the planet is a patchwork of nations with radically different levels of success against the pandemic. Overall, wealthy nations like the United States and the United Kingdom have fared surprisingly badly; some nations, including India and parts of Africa, have fared astonishingly, mysteriously well.
Of course, there is surely something to learn from each experience, and some policies have worked “better” than others (depending on whether your measure of success looks at infections, or deaths, or economic success). But people (including the media, which loves a good headline) often make the mistake of thinking that big, broad lessons can be drawn from a few notable factlets in any individual country’s experience. I’m pretty sure they can’t.
Alongside a mishmash of policies on social distancing, mask wearing, travel restrictions, contact tracing, etc, there’s a huge range in compliance with those policies, often varying dramatically within a single country or region. Nations also differ in terms of climate, population density, economic disparity, health care systems, levels of background chronic illness, vitamin D levels, and (possibly) natural immunity from exposure to other similar coronaviruses. There are a lot of factors that might be at play, many of them entirely beyond the control of officials.
Here in British Columbia, where I live, provincial health officer Bonnie Henry was given a lot of international, positive attention at the start of the pandemic for her data-based, calm and clear advice and recommendation to “be kind, be calm, be safe”. People loved her. They admired her policies, her manner, and even her shoes. We had cases and fatalities but did not descend into madness. She was given credit.
As the pandemic wore on, and numbers started to climb in winter, that outpouring of love turned to more critique about sometimes vague, seemingly unfair and contradictory advice, and a lack of firmness on social distancing policies and travel bans.
There’s something to be said for all these plaudits and criticisms. Politicians and officials do need to be held accountable, and some forms of policy and communication are better (or worse) than others. The public needs to trust their source of information and direction; policymakers need to listen as much as they talk; people need to feel heard and engaged; clarity and firmness garner respect.
But it’s also vital to remember that a large part of the community and biological impacts of this virus aren’t entirely in any policymaker’s hands.
It’s going to take years, if not decades, for the data to settle down and some firm conclusions to be drawn about what happened during this pandemic, what worked best, and what failed. In fact, maybe we won’t ever work it out. Despite a long history with flu (regular flu), researchers still argue about how it travels around the globe, and why it’s worse some years than others. And despite this long history (or perhaps because of it; history makes experience feel ‘normal’ so we stop being incensed by it) our societies accept a lot of deaths from flu (up to 650,000 a year). Despite the development of vaccines, researchers haven’t managed to answer all the questions or whittle that number down to zero.
This pandemic of course provides greater incentive for research: without the measures enacted, the death rate (currently 2.6 million globally) would be much, much higher. But biology is complicated. We cannot and should not expect any simple answers (Masks are the solution! A vaccine will end it!) to this new and complex problem.
