The latest figures are a wake-up call: the global Covid-19 crisis isn't close to over
It took more than three months for the world to record 1 million cases of Covid-19. The latest 1 million cases were clocked up in a week, taking the total to more than 10 million. On Sunday 28 June, the world recorded more than 190,000 new cases in a single day, a new record.
Don’t fixate on the precise numbers. We are testing more than ever so we find more cases. What matters is the big picture and it is drawn in stark relief: the crisis is not yet over. Far from it. Even as east Asia and Europe begin to experience recovery, the momentum of the disease at the global level is building. Nor is this the famous “second wave”. This is still the first wave spreading out across the world’s 7.8 billion inhabitants.
The question is do we have the political imagination, the sympathy and the grit necessary to grasp this crisis at the world level? Can public opinion and decision-makers in Europe and Asia, where the disease has been more or less effectively suppressed, be rallied to support an adequate global response to the crisis in the rest of the world?
The pandemic poses a profound challenge to the contemporary imagination. It has made real both the degree of our interconnectedness and the extreme difficulty that we, particularly those of us in the west, have in grasping the global forces that are at work.
This was already obvious back in January 2020. No need here to rehash the painful story of delay and prevarication; endless recriminations and postmortems are their own form of parochialism. The point is that the west treated a crisis in Wuhan as a remote and exotic problem, made all the more so by China’s “totalitarian” response. We talked about a “Chernobyl moment” for Xi’s regime, as though this was a crisis happening in the 1980s in an obscure Ukrainian town behind the iron curtain, rather than a highly infectious disease spreading through one of the world’s most dynamic and wellconnected conurbations. The model should have been Chicago not Chernobyl.
London and New York, which bask in their status as “world cities”, did not appear to appreciate that a crisis in Wuhan was a matter of the utmost importance. In the US the most critical failures in February and March were not so much in Washington DC but in New York. California locked down. New York did not. We know the results. In New York state at least 31,484 people have died, as of yesterday.
So much for the failures. But even our appreciation of the geography of success is biased. The countries that did get it right were those closest to China, which have had recent experience of infectious disease threats such as Mers. But, again, we tend to exoticise their difference. We pigeonhole them as striving, emerging-market “Asian tigers”, countries with inhuman school regimes, dizzying student scores in Stem subjects, and a relaxed approach to personal privacy.
It is time to look again at the numbers and face the facts. South Korea and Taiwan are no longer “emerging”. They have emerged. Indeed, they have overtaken much of the west in terms of affluence, technological sophistication and the basic public security they offer their fortunate citizens.
Singapore, invoked by Brexiteers as though it were a bargain-basement model of a free-market society, is, in fact, in the super league of affluence, alongside Switzerland and oil-rich Norway. Taiwan’s GDP per capita is on a par with that of the richer European countries – think Germany and Sweden. South Korea is in the range of Spain, the UK and New Zealand. Covid-19 is a wake-up call to adjust our world rankings and our understanding of our place in them.
As the rest of the world has floundered, the problem for the success stories, including China, has been to contain the risk of reinfection from the outside. There was a sense of historical justice in this. Beginning in the 19th century, European states built a global public health regime with the explicit objective of limiting the spread of diseases such as cholera and yellow fever from Asia and Africa to the west. In 2020 Asia feared infection from Europe. But this carnivalesque inversion of historic geographies was short-lived. Now, as the disease spreads to Latin America, Africa and south Asia, a grim new hierarchy threatens. The disease will divide those that are rich, and thus in a position to “cope”, from the rest. Covid-19 may become another of those “poor-country diseases” that kills hundreds of thousands in a regular year. Think malaria or TB, but more infectious and thus requiring more rigorous social distancing.
The implications for our multiethnic, mobile societies are grim. Mexican Americans make up roughly 11% of the US population, Latinos all told 18%. Millions pass back and forth every year. Latin America now accounts for 53% of global mortality. You might think that the rampant spread of Covid-19 south of the US border would be an urgent priority for the US. Trump will of course exploit the disaster for his xenophobic purposes. But what is the progressive answer?
The only reason that the Americas do not entirely dominate the global mortality statistics right now is that the numbers are rising ominously in India and Africa, too. If it continues on its current track, this escalation will pose huge challenges for migrant workers and their families, as quarantine rules restrict travel and surging unemployment cuts off remittance flows.
The poor-country Covid-19 crisis was long foretold. In the spring there was a flurry of activity among institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. But this was followed by a sense of anticlimax as the disease seemed to slow. The global pandemic is now in full flood. In March the vast majority of the world locked down. It has not been sustained. It would take catastrophic death rates to make a second lockdown politically viable. If Chinese or Europeanstyle suppression is off the table, the focus must be on low-cost mass testing and a global push to ensure best practice in treatment, including key drugs for all. The costs are high but eminently affordable. With the US hamstrung by its isolationist president, the question of Covid-19, as on other global challenges such as climate breakdown, is whether Asia and Europe can combine to deliver the necessary leadership.
• Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University
unconstitutional by the court just four years ago, the case was less about the merits than it was about the supreme court as an institution. Nothing has changed since the Whole Women’s Health decision in 2016 except the makeup of the court itself: of the nine justices who presided over Whole Women’s Health, one conservative died and one swing vote retired, and Scalia and Kennedy were replaced by archconservatives and committed misogynists under Donald Trump, in the form of Neil Gorsuch and multiply accused sexual assault perpetrator Brett Kavanaugh.
The question in June Medical Services, then, was not a question of law but of temperament. Now that the court has two new justices who oppose women’s rights, would they be willing to baldly defy precedent and throw out their own decision from just a few years ago? In other words, how brazenly would the court allow itself to subvert the rule of law in order to secure the policy outcomes that are desired by conservatives?
Even before oral arguments were held in early March, much of the attention in this case was focused on Roberts. A Bush appointee and ideological conservative, Roberts has felt the court lurch dramatically to the right underneath him during his tenure as chief justice, and is said to worry about the political pressures on the court from Republicans and the potential to politicize and delegitimize the institution as a result. In June Medical Services, the conflict between Roberts’ sincerely held conservative, anti-woman views and his calculated desire to preserve the legitimacy of the court, and hence his own power, came into stark relief. He had dissented in Whole Women’s Health and sided with the conservatives to uphold the restrictive abortion law; would he hold the same line again, undoing the ruling of his own court? For a while, both women’s right to access abortion and the court’s own continued respect for precedent hinged on the answer to one question: is John
Roberts capable of shame?
Evidently, he is, at least somewhat. Instead of joining the liberals in declaring the Louisiana law unconstitutional on the merits, Roberts issued a narrow concurrence based on stare decisis, the legal principle that requires the court to defer to precedent – in this case, the extremely recent precedent of Whole Women’s Health. In siding with the liberals, Roberts rejected the most cynical and opportunistic of rightwing arguments, and signaled that conservatives will need to be more tactful and less brazen in their attempts to manipulate the court into delivering their policy ends.
But Roberts is no ally to the liberal wing of the court, and those who wish to see the far right’s social and legal agenda kept at bay by the judiciary should be wary of him. Like other times he has joined the liberal wing of the court to uphold some decent decision – notably in the recent Daca case – Roberts often finds himself begrudgingly on the right side of history because the conservative legal thinking that he would prefer to side with is often sloppily and stupidly executed.
In the Daca case, Roberts said that the Trump administration was wrong to remove protections from Dreamers not because Dreamers had a legal or constitutional claim to dignity and due process, but because the Trump administration had been too incompetent to properly justify the action on the bureaucratic level. Likewise, in June Medical Services, Roberts finds himself siding with women’s rights not because he believes in them – in his concurrence, he was careful to point out that he still thinks Whole Women’s Health was wrongly decided – but because the lawsuit itself represented a cynical, lazy and bad-faith attempt on the part of conservatives to exploit the new composition of the court.
His objections to the right wing’s cruelty are not based on principle, but on procedure. Once conservatives adopt a more competent and rigorous strategy in their attacks on civil liberties, we can expect Roberts to take their side.