Nothing will stop pandemic policy beast

Does the coronavirus’s undeniable lethality justify the unprecedented economic upheaval imposed on the world? We don’t know. We do, however, know that the impact of the Great Lockdown is massive.

Instead of an assessment of the effectiveness of these massive policy initiatives, Canadians and the rest of the world are being urged to prepare for more spending, more interventions and more government control over the economy.

From top- level policy shapers in international agencies to bottom- up activists of all stripes — union leaders, green activists, municipal politicians, national politicians, climate scientists — everyone is scrambling to find ways to keep the pandemic policy machine humming along indefinitely.

Six months ago this Friday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Heath Organization ( WHO), declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. On that day, March 11, the number of cases across 114 countries had reached 118,000 and the number of deaths stood at 4,291. The announcement triggered the Great Lockdown, the greatest deliberate destruction of economic activity in human history — and the largest peacetime expansion of government spending and monetary intervention.

The anniversary of the WHO declaration should serve as an opportunity to objectively review the economic and policy battles the world has waged against the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet no such review appears to be underway, nationally or internationally.

Was the lockdown successful in curbing the spread of the virus? How serious is the risk of death? Are the multi- trillion- dollar costs in economic growth and government spending justifiable? Nobody’s counting. Meantime, pockets of pandemic resistance are popping up — on the beaches of Toronto, in shopping malls in Alberta, on the streets of Berlin and among millions of Americans.

Two aspects of the pandemic — the path of the virus through the population and the incalculable impact of the lockdown on the economy — offer plenty of reasons to question whether Canadian and world leaders know what they are doing.

An exception is the moderate concession last week by German Health Minister Jens Spahn, who said that shutting down German retailing in the wake of the pandemic declaration was a mistake. “Today we can make better decisions between protection and everyday life because we know more, because we have more experience,” he said.

No such admissions have come from Canadian politicians or health officials, as the daily release of case data keeps the media humming in anticipation. The statistics, however, raise more questions than answers about the viciousness of the coronavirus.

More than 5.8 million Canadians have been tested. The total number of cases stood at 132,000 on Monday, or about 0.3 per cent of the population. Most of the cases ( about 117,000) had safely recovered and only 6,500 were active. Of the 9,146 deaths since the pandemic started, almost all occurred during the early stages among elderly people, most in nursing facilities. Through August, fewer than 200 people died from COVID-19, well below the spring and summer rate when up 200 people were dying every day. We are making progress, as the National Post’s Colby Cosh suggests elsewhere in these pages.

Does the virus’s undeniable lethality justify the unprecedented economic upheaval imposed on the world? We don’t know. We do, however, know that the impact of the Great Lockdown on jobs, corporations, small businesses, incomes, growth, health, government spending and monetary expansion is massive.

Global economic growth alone is expected to fall somewhere between 4.4 and five per cent this year ( a loss of US$ 5 trillion), which was described by the World Bank as the greatest economic collapse since 1870. In Canada, a GDP loss of eight per cent, or $ 140 billion this year alone, coupled with massive amounts of government spending, would put the cost to Canadians at $500 billion, with more to come.

Instead of an assessment of the effectiveness of these massive policy initiatives, Canadians and the rest of the world are being urged to prepare for more spending, more interventions and more government control over the economy. From top- level policy shapers in international agencies to bottom- up activists of all stripes — union leaders, green activists, municipal politicians, national politicians, climate scientists — everyone is scrambling to find ways to keep the pandemic policy machine humming along indefinitely.

Leading the perpetual covidism campaign are the various agencies and groups camped out around the United Nations and its sustainable development goals. Less than 20 days after the WHO declared the pandemic, UN Secretary General António Guterres seized the opportunity to expand the fight against the virus into every nook and cranny of the global economy.

“Everything we do during and after this crisis must be with a strong focus on building more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global challenges we face,” he said.

By April, the World Economic Forum had called for a global pandemic response that would incorporate climate, equality and other policies. In June, the OECD — backed by Canada and other developed nations — weighed in with a multitude of plans under the UN- invented slogan, “build back better.” In a report sub- titled, “A Sustainable, Resilient Recovery after COVID-19,” the OECD warned against a return to business-as-usual and called on member states to tackle “global environmental emergencies such as climate change and biodiversity loss.”

Linking the COVID-19 pandemic to other longer- term policy issues is now officially embedded throughout political and policy systems the world over. Build back better was instantly adopted by green activists and is now the unofficial policy slogan of various politicians and political parties around the world, including Canada’s Liberals.

In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, climate activist Bill Mckibben discusses how he sees the COVID-19 lockdown as an economic model: “The pandemic provides some useful sense of scale — some sense of how much we are going to have to change to meet the climate challenge.”

That’s a long way from the WHO’S pandemic declaration last March, but is seems to be where the policy world is heading.