Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  I think that at least part of the answer is us. It is Elias and me, born and brought up around the world, speaking many languages, living in many places, splitting time between different countries — we are globalized, perhaps more than any generation that preceded us. Like the plague spreading around trade routes, the coronavirus was moving with the flow of people, aided in great part by cheaper and faster travel, and an economy that sees few borders. In one of the more spectacular displays, a British national picked up the virus in Singapore at a business conference, then went skiing in France before returning home. From one person, eleven ended up hospitalized over three countries. And it is more than increased travel. In the past, a company might design, source, and manufacture all in one spot, but that has become increasingly rare. Now, the webs of supply chains and relationships are increasingly interwoven around the world. That increasing interconnectedness has made the effects of pandemics so much worse. More than shaping the lives of those like me, globalization has defined the entire twenty-first century, and so, like never before, small disturbances can ripple into tidal waves.

  9

  I grew up in Wuppertal in the 1990s, a city of 350,000 just east of the river Rhine, famous for its schwebebahn, a suspended transit system whose rails and wheels are on top. My father was then a graduate student at the local university. We lived at an address on Paulussenstraße, which we rented from Frau Petrick, an avid gardener who was very kind to me once by pretending to be frightened when I ambushed her in a homemade mask. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Germany, despite sticking out sorely as an ethnic minority. All the local kids thought I was from Japan, and I was too awkward to correct them.

  You can’t really blame them, though. Back then, it was a little after the Berlin Wall fell, when Japan, despite a recession, was still the world’s largest economy after the United States, not that different from China now. It feels funny recounting this, as if talking about events from centuries ago when it was not even thirty years. But a lot can happen in that time. China back then was viewed maybe just a little more charitably than North Korea. Soldiers had opened fire on protestors, and an estimated hundreds to thousands died during the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. I don’t think many Germans at the time imagined they would ever see a person from China in real life. Yet the seeds of change had been planted just a few years earlier by, of all things, the opening in 1987 of the first KFC in Beijing. And with that and what that symbolized, what was once dubbed the “sick man of Asia” was set on a path to overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Key factors in realizing that status were China’s ability — through sheer numbers and the centralized power of the ruling Communist Party — to provide cheap labour and manufacturing unmatched in the rest of the world; its increasing cross-border relations; and a proliferation of trade due to rising globalization. Rather quickly, China went from being a poor and agrarian country with relatively few ties outside its borders to being a presence in just about every country in the world. Not long ago, a novel coronavirus that started in China would probably have stayed in China. Indeed, my kneejerk thinking when I left there was that the virus wouldn’t follow. I should have known better.

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  In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, the humourist Douglas Adams writes about how dependent the quintessential human male is on his community: “Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.” Someone actually put that theory to the test. “I’m trying to build a toaster, from scratch — beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that…sells for only £3.99,” the British designer Thomas Thwaites wrote on the website for his book The Toaster Project. He failed miserably. Our world has become so interconnected, the web of supply chains so vast and intricate, a simple toaster requires some four hundred components, sourced from all over the globe. The core driver of that was the pursuit of efficiency and better profit margins, accelerated by globalization, and Thwaites was hardly the first to realize that.

  In 1958, the American economist Leonard Read wrote an essay titled “I, Pencil.” It was from that writing instrument’s point of view, detailing the sheer complexity of its creation — such that “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me,” the pencil said. That statement applies for a toaster, a pencil, or anything at all for that matter. It exemplifies the extensive divisions of labour that have come to define our economy, distilled into the credo that people should all be doing what they do best. The required cedar for the pencil grows in Northern California and Oregon, whose farmers have made a name for themselves for providing such wood. The resultant logs are shipped to San Leandro, California, to be cut, where the area’s millwrights specialize in that, having trained for years and to do it better than their competitors. The graphite is mined in Sri Lanka, then mixed with clay from Mississippi and treated with wax from Mexico, and the oil that goes into the rubber is from Indonesia — all areas where such materials are the most easily obtained. Stretching supply lines around the world, farming out the production of individual components to wherever they can be made at the lowest price, means selling cheaper pencils than the competitor — or getting more profit while maintaining the price, better margins for the same cost. In turn, such sourcing has caused certain industries, particularly specialized ones, to cluster even more tightly together. California’s Central Valley, for example, produces some 80 per cent of the world’s almonds. Thus, no company — no country — is truly independent, everyone uploaded onto a vast, tangled global network. And that has exposed everyone to new risk. COVID-19 would show that, while individual companies had profited, interdependency had created weakness in the wider ecosystem.

  In such a world, with so many moving parts, small shocks in one corner can drastically affect the whole. If war mars Australia, which produces the most iron ore in the world, maybe customers get no toasters in the United Kingdom. If strikes in San Leandro, California, close down the mill, perhaps the American pencil company shuts down. Sometimes that is that. Sometimes the onward impact just stops there. It takes the alignment of millions of stars, millions of dominos falling in just the right way, for small events to ripple big. Most don’t, and you never hear about them. Imagine the thousands, maybe millions, of other animal-borne infections all throughout history that, for one reason or another, did not spread so well, their names known only in lab reports and scholarly journals, if at all. The integrated nature of the world, however, combined with instantaneous transmission of information, presents more pathways for these events to escalate — more than ever before. Sometimes, when the San Leandro lumber mill shuts down, it doesn’t just affect the pencil company. It could affect the cedar farm in Oregon, too, for one of its biggest clients may be the pencil company that now cannot make pencils.

  By the time of COVID-19, China’s share of the world economy had become four times the figure during the SARS outbreak. That larger share, when shaken, was enough to send global laptop production plunging by as much as 50 per cent at one point. Four times as big also means four times as connected, in a world already increasingly integrated. A U.S. business is now more likely to sell to China. When that American business suffers, so does the Canadian company it partners with. So does the French company that buys from the Canadian one. And that’s just the ripple effect from the disruption in China alone. When COVID-19 spread, that impact was amplified as economies everywhere shut down. Eventually, European carmakers feared widespread disruption simply because a single electronics manufacturer had been forced to suspend production.

  That vulnerability can be seen everywhere, for every small aspect of the economy is a microcosm for the whole, just like how, at the top of a tree, the spindly limbs and their offshoots have the same proportions as the thick trunk and its branches at the bottom. Every branch is a miniature of the one it diverged from, like how, under the microscope, zooming on
to bits of a snowflake reveals intricate, repeating patterns. In this complex machine of a world, every cog contains smaller — but just as complex — machines.

  Within organizations, roles are so specialized that nobody can do anything by themselves. Even the president of the pencil company has only “a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how” on how to make the product, Read wrote in “I, Pencil.” To take this a step further, rather than just dividing labour within, companies also parcel it out. For one example, few companies hire their own cleaning staff. Newspapers, for another, increasingly outsource page design to specialized firms. By 2018, a thousand separate American publications had their pages designed out of just twenty-five hubs. At one point, 40 per cent of the world’s electronics — iPhones, BlackBerrys, Nokia mobile devices, PlayStations, Xbox, Wii — were contracted out to one Taiwanese company for assembly. Even governments have been increasingly outsourcing. In Alberta, if you lose your driver’s licence or want to register a company, it’s the private sector that takes care of that. With everyone a gear — not just a part of but also dependent on a greater whole — with everyone occupying such a specialized role in nearly every aspect of society, that creates expansive, pervasive interdependency. Douglas Adams was too generous in saying one person could make even a sandwich from scratch, which would require knowledge in bread-making, animal-rearing, meat-curing, farming, and sauce-blending.

  Thus, the ever-present cause and effect, the onward impact of each disturbance to the world, can go on and on and back and forth without end. Eventually, with one-third of humanity under some sort of lockdown, demand for oil fell, and amid an oversupply, the commodity’s price hit a negative. Producers had to pay for people to take their crude away. And this doesn’t just affect the oil executives— what of the future of cars and those who make them? During the COVID-19 crisis, nobody was visiting shopping malls, restaurants, entertainment venues, or going to school. And services, whatever the kind, make up four in five American jobs. So companies lay off people, who may default on their loans. Companies may default on their loans, too. Bankruptcies quickly started sweeping the retail landscape, with old and respected brands such as Neiman Marcus seeking relief from billions of dollars in debt. Banks took a bludgeoning. Amid the resulting financial uncertainty, everyone spends less, and the cycle repeats. Combine that with supply chain disruptions, the modern world’s rapid flow of information, and big finance’s high-frequency algorithmic trading (computers now make some 40 per cent of all stock transactions, ensuring business shocks reverberate quickly to investors), and we had a recipe for disaster.

  Because of the pandemic, the United States’ economy was expected to shrink by a quarter over three months, as large a drop, proportionally, as was seen during the Great Depression over the course of four years, the historian Adam Tooze noted. Unemployment surged to levels not seen since that dark era, increasing by the day, so rapidly that any official figures included here would be outdated — the system can’t track them in real time. And around the interconnected world, this picture is replicated — devastation across the land. Just as this medical problem became a financial and economic one, as discontent and frustration mount, it will quickly become a societal and geopolitical one as well. It takes just one rusty cog for the whole system to crash.

  A proverb from thirteenth-century Europe — it’s nearly impossible to pin its origins more specifically than that — describes how an initially small problem leads into successively more critical stages, resulting in a catastrophic outcome, how tiny fractures grow into chasms. The loss of a single metal pin affected the horse’s shoe, and then turned the tide of battle, the proverb reads. “For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost.”

  10

  With the massive escalation of events in March had come another disruption to my travel plans: On my return flight from Germany to Canada, I had planned a stop in New Jersey to visit my aunt and two cousins, my Beijing uncle’s family. But U.S. president Donald Trump, doing an almost 180-degree about-face from his original laissez-faire attitude about the pandemic, had since decided to ban most travel from the European Union, leaving me out of luck.

  My close relationship with my uncle was only strengthened during our week in effective quarantine and symbolically sealed by his giving me his precious last Honeywell H910V face mask. Also, after helping him edit his philosophical essays to his children, I came to know a lot about my uncle’s family, whom I hadn’t seen for years. So, I had been particularly looking forward to the visit. As I sat in Elias’s apartment in Bayreuth, reading the travel-ban announcement from President Trump in sullen frustration, the thought of getting on the phone to change my ticket, yet again, was as pleasant as wet socks. The truth is that I would have much rather tried to touch the moon than spend the next several hours on hold.

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  When Lieutenant Lewis Nixon, in the 2001 Second World War television series Band of Brothers, notices a white flower on the lapel of a dead Wehrmacht soldier, he says: “That’s edelweiss. It grows in the mountains, above the treeline, which means he climbed up there to get it.” The flower’s name is a combination of “noble” and “white” in German, and it blossoms three thousand metres above sea level. According to nineteenth-century lore, young men would risk their lives to retrieve it for their brides. For a warrior, it’s a calling card — “supposed to be the mark of a true soldier,” Nixon says. But really, the flower’s difficulty to obtain was largely an exaggeration by those who plucked it — and that is so especially today, when anyone in the world can order edelweiss online.

  The point is, what we previously thought of as exotic and luxurious is now reduced to the commonplace. No doubt, parts of the world are still mired in strife, famine, and poverty, and even the richest and most powerful countries are marred by inequity. But we also live in an unprecedented age, where most in the developed world eat and live better than the king of Bavaria did back in the day. We also have better teeth. And with more than 3.5 billion people around the world owning a smartphone, a piece of machinery that can contain all the world’s books and answer pretty much any question you have with the touch of a button, various playing fields have been significantly levelled in the last decade or so. As well, easy and affordable travel between countries has become readily available to more people around the world than we could have imagined even a generation ago. I have gone back and forth around the world, seeing groups of people that in the past would never have met, speaking languages that could not be further from each other. And yet, everywhere, so much has become the same, interchangeable and even mundane. German gebirgsjäger troops may still bear the edelweiss insignia, but when what was previously deemed so precious is now ordinary, there is an inevitable loss of meaning in our symbols. In a way, the insignia’s greatest significance now is as a reminder of how far we have come.

  Globalization, like most things, has its strengths and weaknesses, gains and losses — but, for example, the world no longer erupts into war when a European power annexes part of a neighbour. Now they just sanction the invader. Assassinate an Austrian aristocrat today? Sanction. The closeness of the world has meant that, just as there are companies that profit off bloodshed, there will also always be powerful business interests opposing any all-out war, and that purely economic punishments are deemed harsh enough to deliver the message. We still kill each other, of course, but on nowhere near the scale we used to. More than just enriching parts of the planet and generally bettering people’s lives, this interdependence has also been an achievement in the name of peace. Yet it has also made the world painfully vulnerable to a new death. The entire arc of humanity over the past century has bent toward this day of wrath.

  The air carried the virus, and between steely wings, it also carried the infected. And more than allowing this rapid contagion-spread, previously unfathomable, globalization also increased the chance that the impacts would ripple, and how widely. Nassim Nicholas Tal
eb, who wrote The Black Swan, has disagreed that this current pandemic is part of the titular phenomenon of his book, an unforeseeable event that causes an impact disproportional to its low probability. To him, it was completely foreseeable. A world like ours, so interconnected, is exactly the sort in which COVID-19 would have such an oversized and paralyzing effect.

  The historical parallel of the pandemic to the bubonic plague is uncanny, particularly given that in both cases humanity’s own work had made it weak against an unknown threat. The Black Death, too, had come from the East, then a part of the world-spanning Mongol Empire, a pioneer of the west–east Silk Road trade route, which eventually moved the disease as quickly as it did people and goods. Then there were the naval paths of commerce in Europe. It took as little as a year for the plague to spread from Crimea to almost everywhere else in Europe. A 2005 New Yorker article read:

  Ironically, the plague is associated with prosperity. As long as a region remains undeveloped, with low populations, small towns, heavy forests, and little trade, its local rats will remain in their holes and die quietly of the plague without passing it.

  As the continent developed, as international commerce blossomed and the population doubled, “everything that the Europeans had built up in the preceding centuries turned against them…. Their far-flung trade brought them more rats. Their fine cities ran with filth.”