"Precious time for the world"
March 13, 2020
IT IS, alas, becoming increasingly clear that COVID-19 is not even primarily a China story.
John Ashton, the former British Director of Public Health, said on the BBC’s Question Time that he’s “embarrassed” by the inaction of the United Kingdom’s government. He also castigated the decision to let 3,000 supporters of Atletico Madrid go to Anfield on Wednesday night, which will spread the virus throughout the bars and clubs of Merseyside and then beyond.
“The virus is no doubt among us for reasons that are totally obscure to me,” says Ashton.
Why is the United Kingdom not screening incoming travellers at its airports, when every other country is doing so? Why is it not closing schools when 40-odd other countries have done so? Why is no one wearing a mask? In China, we are already habituated to them, slipping them on every time there’s yet another bout of PM2.5, but elsewhere there are significant cultural impediments.
Over in the United States, the left-wing liberal press says this crisis finally exposes what a useless, gutless, mendacious fraud the U.S. president is. The New Yorker says “crises clarify”:
As the coronavirus, as of Wednesday an official pandemic, spreads, the lives of Americans depend on the decisions made—or not made, as the case may be—by a President uniquely ill-suited to command in this type of public-health catastrophe. In that sense, the last few weeks may well have been the most clarifying of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
Trump first declared the crisis to be a “hoax” hyped up by his enemies in the press to try to undermine him. Then he said it was under control, dies in warmer weather and was about to disappear, and wasn’t very serious anyway. Then he decided to ban all travel from mainland Europe and claim that he knew all along that this would be catastrophic.
Meanwhile, China itself is now moving into triumphalist mode. State media continues to laud the sacrifices made by the thousands of doctors and health workers in Wuhan, and the China Daily claimed yesterday that their actions have saved thousands of lives in China and overseas. President Xi Jinping also told the UN Secretary General last night that China’s efforts “had won precious time for the world” and that the crisis underscored the fact that we are a global community with common interests that need to be tackled together.
What Xi and Chinese state media are suggesting is that the virus could have emerged anywhere, and at any time, and it was merely unfortunate that it happened to originate in Wuhan. This, they imply, is not a disease “made in China”: it just happened to reveal itself here, as if by chance.
Such an interpretation allows China to resist efforts to blame the epidemic on the country’s policy failures, its systemic lack of transparency, its urban overcrowding or its cruel cultural practices when it comes to the trafficking and consumption of wildlife.
“Pandemics don’t just happen,” writes Jonathan Quick in The End of Epidemics. “All kinds of complex and interconnected social, economic, and environmental risk factors contribute to the emergence and spread of disease.” Population growth creates more demand for food, water and shelter, leading to deforestation and bringing people into closer contact with animals carrying dangerous pathogens.
A Chinese academic paper published yesterday by Shanghai-based political scientists claimed that the coronavirus crisis had further cemented the “unity” of the nation. It is highly possible that Xi will come out of all this stronger than ever. The system itself has closed ranks, making use of its monopoly on the flow of information, not to mention its monopoly on violence, to enforce its own interpretation of events. That interpretation is brazenly positive, and the more China recovers while the rest of the world suffers, the more plausible it becomes.
