Controlling COVID: If governments step back, will citizens step up?
A woman wearing an FFP2 face mask to curb the spread of COVID-19 sits in a coffee bar in Madrid. Spain and other European countries are stiffening mask mandates so as to avoid lockdowns and other restrictions on daily life.
Manu Fernandez/AP
London
Zero COVID. That was the alluring refrain – and understandable goal – of countries around the world at the outset of the pandemic.
Not any longer.
More and more governments are concluding that “zero” is an unattainable target, or at least an unsustainable one, given the huge social and economic costs of lockdowns. A new consensus goal is emerging, summed up last week by Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez: not shutting out COVID-19, but finding a strategy to live with it.
Why We Wrote This
As governments move from fighting the coronavirus to living with it, they will depend on a new understanding with their citizens. What will that take?
And that’s part of a deeper shift in the political landscape of the pandemic, with potential implications for major democracies even if it does begin to wane. At issue is the fundamental relationship between governments and the governed.
During the early stages of the coronavirus, the sheer scale of the challenge facing the world rekindled many citizens’ fraying trust in their governments. They realized that, especially in time of crisis, there were some things that only governments could do.
But the move toward “living with” the virus is being powered by political leaders’ recognition of the limits to effective government action; many accept that making the new approach work will ultimately depend on their citizens’ individual choices about how to behave.
This shift in thought is occurring at different speeds in different countries, and it could still be rerouted by a new turn in the pandemic. But the trend is clear, aside from China, which remains wedded to zero COVID-19 in the run-up to next month’s Beijing Olympics.
Spain is not the only European country eyeing a new approach. A number of its neighbors are also moving toward loosening mandates and controls.
In Israel, a precursor and model for pandemic policies in other countries since early in the pandemic, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett this month ruled out imposing a fourth lockdown, saying that it wouldn’t just be costly. It wouldn’t work.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – who not only pursued zero COVID-19, but for a long time achieved it – has also concluded that the goal is no longer possible.
None of this means that governments have decided to throw up their hands and do nothing. But they are shifting toward more targeted public health measures, such as widespread masking or vaccine passports. Except in China, full-scale lockdowns are becoming a measure of last resort, considered only if health care systems are under make-or-break pressure.
An immediate catalyst for the change has been the latest coronavirus variant, omicron, whose rampant transmissibility appears, at least so far, to be offset by reduced virulence. That’s why the Spanish prime minister felt able to suggest that European Union countries start moving toward gripalización, treating COVID-19 much like the flu.
But the change had begun gathering pace before omicron, and the reason was political: growing public frustration with what looked like an endless series of repeated shutdowns and constraints without any sign of light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.
Governments are also wary of the huge cost of lockdowns, both to the employees and businesses whose work was disrupted, and to the national treasuries providing the financial support to cushion their effects. So there is every likelihood the new policy trend will strengthen further in the weeks and months ahead.
But there are two major imponderables that bear watching.
The first involves the great zero-COVID-19 holdout, China. Braced for the effects of omicron, and focused on making the Olympics a success, the authorities have imposed new lockdowns in recent weeks. Some 20 million Chinese are now unable to leave their homes.
Politically, the government’s tools of control and enforcement mean President Xi Jinping need not worry about popular pushback.
Yet this is a big year for him politically, with a party congress in the autumn poised to reanoint him in office, with no set term limits. His coronavirus response has become a core part of his contention that the “Chinese model” has proved superior to that of Western-style democracies. So the question for Beijing isn’t whether it can lock down large parts of the country; it’s whether lockdowns will prevent the spread of omicron.
Nor is China immune to the economic costs of its pursuit of zero COVID-19. The latest lockdowns are already raising international concern over the prospect of new interruptions in Chinese business and trade, with knock-on effects for the worldwide supply chain.
For democratic governments, the main imponderable is different.
If their new strategy is to succeed, they know that they will need buy-in from a critical mass of their own people. The approach assumes a kind of partnership, with governments easing their own pandemic measures but citizens stepping up to do what they can individually to reduce the prospect of new outbreaks.
That sense of partnership did seem to flourish in many countries early in the pandemic.
The question now is whether a similar joint effort will be enough to help them move beyond it.