The bid to preserve every life
Was this the worst pandemic or the strongest response?
What, exactly, has happened? It is probably too ambitious to think that a properly considered analysis of the events of this year might be possible. That will be the business of a later generation. But the extremity of our problem being what it is, we must ask some pertinent questions at this point.
Have we experienced the worst viral pandemic in living memory? Or just the most extreme official response to a health crisis?
The answer to the first question is almost certainly, no. The polio epidemics of the 50s, which killed or crippled millions of children, and the Asian flu epidemic of 1968, which took 80,000, mostly young, lives in Britain alone, are right up there in horrific competition with Covid-19.
But the second question requires attention because the answer to that is clearly, yes — and it is important to know why. We need to ask, “Why has the response to this epidemic been different from any other?”
One set of replies might come from science. Perhaps our state of knowledge about how viral infections take hold and spread is greatly advanced since the last great events of this kind, so extreme governmental systems of protection and avoidance could be erected immediately to prevent what was known to be a mass threat. But is that true? Certainly the ability to map the genome of this virus is recent — and has miraculously enabled the invention of an entirely new form of vaccine against it — but at the time of the viral horrors of the 50s and 60s, there was a reasonable understanding of what viruses were and how they spread between human hosts.
And indeed, the global response to coronavirus — which consists mainly of locking people up and preventing them from touching one another — is remarkably unsophisticated. The much-hailed progress of modern science seemed to have nothing more helpful to suggest than the medieval idea of isolating plague households. It is important to note that science had little to offer during the wait for a vaccine that could not have been proposed 50 years ago: as many people have pointed out, similar measures of social isolation could have been enacted in 1968 — but they weren’t. It seemed never to occur to any leader to suggest it.
Why not? It is the politics — or more broadly, the social assumptions — that have changed drastically, not the scientific understanding.
There has been one notable empirical fact that must be taken into account here. That is, that most people who become seriously ill from Covid are those who are elderly and/ or already suffering from conditions that would be expected to shorten life. It is no secret that modern medicine, particularly in advanced countries with public healthcare systems, has devised ways of extending the ordinary life span by many years, or even decades, often by the use of a wide range of prescribed drugs designed to prevent what used to be the usual causes of death. As a consequence, most Western countries now have far more people over the age of 80 than before.
Could the high death toll from the virus in advanced countries be a direct consequence of having kept alive so many elderly who are now protected from heart and respiratory failures that would once have taken them at an earlier age? If it were not for this mass of old people who suffer disproportionately from Covid, would we have regarded the disease as a more minor threat — scarcely more noteworthy than flu? Our success in prolonging life may also have produced a cultural change that is pertinent to this: we appear now to believe death and ill-health can and should be preventable indefinitely.
The decline of religious belief, which suggested death gave significance to life, seems to have combined with a sense that governments should be directly responsible for the permanent welfare of all, to produce a perfect climate for this super-response to a spreading disease. State health systems, and public reliance on them, has created a new moral order in which the success of medicine gives it a civil dominion which cannot be questioned: hence, the insensitivity and authoritarianism of medical and scientific experts who pay lip service to the idea that only elected political leaders can decide policy but clearly feel they should be in charge even of moral priorities.
So unquestionable is the medical imperative to preserve every life that arguments about the damage to the quality of other lives is brushed aside. It will probably take some time to fully appreciate the strangeness of this conclusion, even though it is more likely to be on the minds of ordinary people than they would care to admit. A future historian may decide this was the inevitable triumph of secularism.
More mundane factors must come into the reckoning. Social isolation isn’t what it used to be. Most of the world can access digital communications, which means you are not cut off from the world when imprisoned at home. Perhaps the answer to the question, why have we never done this before, is simply that it has never been possible before. An extraordinary amount of economic and social activity has been maintained throughout even the most severe lockdowns. What was sacrificed was the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life. This has been a social experiment like no other.