COVID's two new solitudes

So far, the policy response to COVID has been to try to limit and control outbreaks, largely through full or partial shutdowns of our personal and economic lives. It has been a somewhat oppositional process, with lockdowns imposed by public sector authorities, and resisted, to varying degrees, by the private sector, which, now and in the future, bears their full costs.

Private sector opposition to lockdowns has been defused largely by shunting their costs, and the need to responsibly manage them, into the future. The public sector can deflect criticisms of its policies in this way because it has unlimited power to push the rest of us into debt. It is in effect buying us off with our own money. Lots of it. Whether or not government relief is essential, we can be sure it will be far less efficient and far more costly than were individuals to determine and manage their own needs. But, of course, to a large extent they cannot, because the authorities forbid their work.

The moral hazard of this situation is obvious. In fact, it is worse than it seems — because by creating lockdowns and limiting economic and personal freedoms the public sector, knowingly or not, optimizes its own affairs at our expense. It faces no loss of employment, benefits or income. Indeed, just this year federal public servants got a significant raise, despite in many cases doing little or no actual work and demonstrating that their absence had no noticeable impact on our lives. Was the ear for how that would play in Kapuskasing so very tin? Canada has two new solitudes.

Lockdowns minimize to near zero any health risk for the public sector, with the additional benefit of long paid holidays, even in places like P.E.I. where COVID is hardly a thing. The public sector makes the pandemic rules but has little skin in the game. That is a major structural deficiency in how pandemic policy is developed. Policy-makers' perspective is unnaturally isolated from those on whom it is imposed, whose livelihoods rely on producing immediate economic value to feed their families and replenish the public purse, too. Moreover, the structural deficiencies that undermine government decision-making are exacerbated by government reliance on university “experts” — people who are in fact blinkered by the same deficiencies of perspective, if not worse. (Such limitations of institutional perspective are not moral failings: we lawyers, too, are not known for advising our clients to take even reasonable risks.)

The default tactic of shutdown seems partly due to fear and partly to the desire to shield our weak healthcare system from criticism and collapse. What strategy this short-term risk-avoidance tactic serves has not been clear. But without a clear strategy, how to measure the utility of any tactic? With nothing to fear for itself, the public sector can too quickly dismiss alternative, more immediately difficult policies, such as those proposed in the Great Barrington Declaration — which at least have the virtue of being actual strategies, not stopgap tactics such as we have now. But stopgaps are less a problem for the public sector, which doesn't so urgently need to return to normalcy.

Shutting down is a consequence of political as well as structural motives. It privileges the risk of a few COVID deaths, which seem to be politically consequential, over all the deaths from poverty, delayed surgeries and diagnostics, and suicides, as well as all the economic costs of lockdowns and closed schools. The United Nations estimates that 130 million lives could be lost to starvation because of lockdowns in 2020. But they will mostly be in poorer countries and are therefore less politically consequential.

It isn't hard to imagine what imaginative, courageous governments, with the right incentives, could have done: develop an honest and effective communication program; close off international flights; envision the data needed for nuanced pandemic control measures; create the algorithms to analyze that data; build up sufficient testing capacity; ensure quick new tests are approved and distributed promptly; develop pandemic control structures that incorporate private sector responsiveness in a complex, dynamic model incorporating new therapies and varying mortality rates; temporarily ramp up the hospital capacity we have sacrificed so much to save. And then iterate these actions every day as necessary. Think of the levels of confidence and trust such an approach would inspire. In this modern era, highlevel management of risk, including health risks, must be part of competent government.

It is sometimes suggested that those who work for the public sector should not be entitled to vote, because of conflicts of interest. One could debate that. But there does need to be a realignment of public service. Government needs to treat our interests as its own. It works for us. This structural dichotomy cannot operate against the interests of the citizenry. We need to keep trying to breach the solitudes.