Field Notes from a Pandemic

by Ethan Lou

  When the people and their government are so far apart, it is a hard if not impossible task to introduce something as drastic as a nationwide lockdown. Politicians, under pressure to bend to popular whims instead of expert advice, may think more about their job security than what’s best for the public. Action becomes delayed and lethargic, and any enforcement is made difficult by the public’s lack of faith in those trying to impose the law. The numbers speak for themselves: In April of 2020, with more than twenty thousand deaths, the United States surpassed Italy as the country with the highest COVID-19 mortality. Even if adjusted for population, by June the United States still had the ninth-highest deaths per million people at 366.3. New Zealand had just 4.6 deaths per million.

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  Jean-Yves Duclos, a Canadian cabinet minister who serves as the vice-chair of the country’s official coronavirus committee, has said that, to tackle the pandemic, the government needs to “think in a different mode.” Words to live by, not just for whatever next pandemic hits our shores but in responding to other crises as well. But it’s not so much “a different mode” as a fundamental realignment of our preparedness that is needed, with a particular accent on agility. And if what we’ve learned is that public trust and open, transparent government lies at the heart of that agility, then more than anything, the pandemic has been a wakeup call to build better societies.

  And as public trust in our governments needs to improve, so too does our collective trust in the international bodies that were set up to deal with such challenges as those posed by the pandemic. Certain issues are just too big to tackle alone, or they involve a direct need for speed that cannot tolerate duplications of effort. The search for the COVID-19 vaccine is one of them. The virus, after all, knows no borders, and neither may the next crisis. What started as a China problem quickly morphed into everyone’s problem, not unlike how war in the Middle East creates refugees that destabilize Europe, how coal emissions in a developing country heat up the atmosphere for all of us. More and more, with COVID-19 acting as a clear and sharp exclamation point, it is becoming evident that our best defence in handling such crises is working together and doing so quickly and efficiently.

  But, of course, it is easy to say that. “We did not score enough points this time and need to try harder next time to score more points, while making sure the opposing players score fewer points,” says the losing team’s captain in every post-game interview in every single sport. The way countries reacted to the pandemic was, generally, an extension of how those societies were shaped, a reflection of their cultures and socio-political situations. Nimbleness and flexibility are built over decades, if not centuries. Particularly, with the pandemic’s having torn at the heart of the world, leaving future resiliency in question, the solution is not a simple matter of just being better. Rather, it is committing to the kind of broader infrastructure that makes countries more cohesive, trusting of their leaders, and ultimately prepared for whatever the cosmos throws at them. That should be obvious, especially in the wake of COVID-19. What is less obvious is the road there.

  20

  The end of April marked a new day in Bayreuth. I had been in Germany so long that the stores had begun to open again. In the state of Bavaria, the government announced that restaurants were unfortunately still closed for dining in, but nonessential businesses with floor spaces of under eight hundred square metres were allowed to open, albeit with a new rule: you had to wear face masks when entering. Dutifully, I put on my uncle’s Honeywell for the first time in more than a month, the first time since China, and I made for the Euroshop discount chain that had the one-euro wines Elias had mentioned. I was handed a shopping basket at the door, for everyone had to have one, which was a new rule of sorts. That way, with a limited number of baskets, the shop controlled the number of people who could be on the premises at any time. I forget how many baskets it was, but it wasn’t a lot, no more than a half-dozen. I had to wait for one shopper to finish paying before entering. I found the system quite clever, but what I did not find was one-euro wine. Either they were sold out or it was only Elias’s wishful thinking.

  Exempted from Bavaria’s announced eight-hundred-square-metre rule were bookstores, which I thought was interesting. As lockdowns were eased, what governments allowed to open first often showed their priorities and those of their societies in general. Not to cast aspersions on Canada, but Ontario’s provincial government allowed housekeepers, nannies, and cooks to return to work and opened marinas and golf courses while still discouraging interactions from people in different households. “I’d like to personally congratulate rich people,” wrote one journalist. “Ontario: where your butler can come over, but not your mother,” said another.

  Just three days after bookstores were allowed to open in Bayreuth and environs, Albert Camus’s classic The Plague started leaping off the shelves, climbing to the top of bestseller lists. The Plague depicts a fictional pestilence in the 1940s, but it remains ever-relevant because it is really about authoritarian power — “only when a strong wind was blowing did a faint, sickly odour coming from the east remind them that they were living under a new order.” It isn’t so much about the pathological plague as it is about the human and societal condition. Camus writes about hope and heroism, but also says the plague “never dies or disappears for good.” If and when the plague returns, Camus writes, when it “would rouse up its rats again,” the world will not have emerged stronger and more resilient, and that resurgence will be “for the bane and the enlightening of men.” Plague theme aside, it doesn’t take a lot of thought to see why Germans would make this book a bestseller almost seventy-five years after it was first published.

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  In the Harry Potter series, abusively repressing a young wizard’s abilities generates an “obscurus,” a floating mass of destructive energy. It’s the chief plot line of the Fantastic Beasts spinoff movies, in fact. But it’s not an entirely new idea. In a 2005 X-Men comic-book story arc, swaths of superpowered mutants losing their abilities results in a similar mass of energy dubbed “the Collective.” The idea that trauma does not just go one-way into a black hole, that its effect compounds, bound to echo destructively, is universal and constant. Moreover, energy cannot be destroyed, whether it’s that of magic being suppressed or mutant abilities erased — or the vigour and restlessness of ordinary humans kept indoors with nothing to do. That demands an outlet. One study estimated COVID-19 could lead to 75,000 “deaths of despair” in the United States from suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. Across North America, gun sales have spiked. The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed 3.7 million related background checks in one month, the most since the current gun-regulation system was introduced in 1998. And these figures represent only the effects we are able to see and quantify, mere momentary manifestations of a poison more enduring, one tiny corner of that mass of energy hanging over us.

  While I don’t think any of my friends have begun to arm to themselves, what I have noted since the pandemic began is a rapid polarization of views in some circles. With the lockdown and the issue of compliance, individual freedom versus collective welfare has become a new line of stark division. At first, I noticed only those who had swung toward hyper-adherence, who cut off all physical contact and stopped seeing their parents, even when the law of the land did not require them to do so. Then there were the libertarian types, the ones who went to secret gyms and barbers and speakeasies that defied closure orders, who wined with friends in the park and then heatedly debated with the police breaking up the party. There are also the conspiracy theorists. One Facebook friend started believing everything was a hoax by the establishment to try to control people’s lives, and he did not stop there. I started seeing an increase of posts from him about worldwide child-trafficking conspiracies and a shadowy network of celebrities, banking families, and the American Left. He was not like that before COVID-19, at least not out
wardly. Sometimes, I think about him and wonder if I should have said something, questioned his reasoning, or perhaps asked him if he was really okay. I mean, if ever there was a time for closeted conspiracy theorists to come out, it’s now. COVID-19 is almost perfectly built for such things — science fiction and images of a dystopian world made real. Was this all a global government plot to subjugate us and take away our freedoms and even our lives? Most likely not. But trapped in isolation, left to one’s own devices, pinned to social media in a world seemingly collapsing all around you — that’s the environment for far-fetched and unhinged thinking, even from those not usually prone to such states of mind.

  All things considered, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in the United States sparked mass protests in May 2020 — the largest such uprisings since the 1960s. Frustration and anxiety caused by the lockdowns, along with a disproportional pandemic impact on minorities — both health-wise and financially — and an already incendiary situation based on years of heavy-handed policing set off a spark that blew the whole situation sky high. It really did feel like the end of the world—plague, death, race war, and the decline of the international order. Still, I think to be overly pessimistic is missing the point.

  The antiracism protestors are not unlike the protestors of Hong Kong, rising against what they see as injustice, trying to effect systemic change. In the context of stability and unity, the world may be strengthened by such protests. In the wake of the pandemic, society may be soundly shaken and trend toward disarray and despondence, but no future is inescapable. Even in the pit of chaos, there remains a choice in how the world may climb from it, to build the sort of resiliency that will help it better take on the next crisis.

  The pandemic-driven shift in collective sentiment toward a greater role for the State is an opportunity. Governments would be wise to capitalize on it, not to seize more power or prolong reign but to fortify public faith, listen and act on their people’s frustrations, and to prove their leaders are worthy. Governments also need to instill unity so that people may be influenced to value the group over self. Then, if governments issue another lockdown order or whatever novel emergency rule for this or any other crisis, a justifiable measure for collective welfare, they can secure the necessary compliance, even in a free, inherently individualistic society. If nimbleness and resiliency are the top qualities needed in crisis, then every government needs to make fostering public trust and cohesion its primary goal. One can hardly not think of the global challenge of climate change — are there lessons we can learn from this pandemic and how we responded to it, individually and collectively, that may serve us better in that regard?

  Of course, not every country will think in that direction; in fact, it’s a safe bet most will not, which makes developing a stable and trustworthy international order all the more important. The purpose of such an order would be not just to mount an effective collective crisis response the next time disaster strikes, but to help developing countries build their infrastructure and overall resiliency in the meantime.

  In the wake of the plague, with the weakening of the world order only exacerbated, there will no doubt be a thick quagmire to navigate. For long, the liberal international order and those who stand behind it have been, perhaps, naïve. They assumed countries like China and Russia could become, in their view, enlightened like them, ultimately converted to their cause. But geopolitical competition has only intensified. U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo may have hoped Hong Kong “would provide a model for authoritarian China,” but the opposite has happened. Post-pandemic, as challengers rise, as the system and institutions everyone had taken for granted weaken, how can the world ensure its agility and unity in the face of the next crisis?

  I, of course, don’t have that answer. I don’t think anyone does. But perhaps a change of mindset is in order. Like Yu and the Dutch and their acknowledgement of the inevitability of floodwaters, like how the world needs to realize it will always be caught unprepared by the next crisis, the West needs to accept the decline of its hegemony. Instead of actively trying to stunt the rise of China and Russia, the United States and Europe need to put pressure on them to rise more constructively and, perhaps, share the mantle of global leadership. Hostility and aggression need to be met proportionately, but if the ambitious and hardworking want to grow and prosper, then perhaps the most American thing to do is to let them. Just as challengers to the world order no doubt know that open confrontation helps no one, the West must realize the necessity of co-existence. That’s not entirely a new idea. But given how easily one’s problem becomes everyone else’s in this globalized world, the pandemic has made it all the more important to grasp that oft-repeated truth: to face the next crisis, all need to learn the value of stability and cohesion.

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  In June of 2020, Singapore’s prime minister Lee Hsien Loong wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine for the first time. It was twenty-six years after his father, Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, had appeared in the magazine’s pages in a far-ranging interview in which the now-CNN host Fareed Zakaria asked whether China’s rise would destabilize the region, and he responded, “I don’t think we can speak in terms of just the East Asian order.” The late Lee the elder— who spoke like an old-timey movie character, once called the “finest Englishman east of Suez” by the U.K. foreign secretary — had long been a sort of oracle of the Orient, with lines of U.S. presidents and other world leaders regularly soliciting his views. There is thus a historical heft in the essay of Lee the younger, which addressed the China–U.S. geopolitical competition, the international order, and the pandemic:

  Even with the best relations between the United States and China, mounting a collective response to COVID-19 would be hugely challenging. Unfortunately, the pandemic is exacerbating the U.S.–Chinese rivalry, increasing mistrust, one-upmanship, and mutual blame. This will surely worsen if, as now seems inevitable, the pandemic becomes a major issue in the U.S. presidential election.

  Lee’s words are a warning for the powers and a plea: get your act together; a world mired in a new Cold War will not endure a crisis like this. Countries such as Singapore depend on trade and, thus, stability. Lee has drubbed that drum aplenty. But it is rare for Lee to write an opinion piece, and his choice of publication — a premier can write anywhere — speaks volumes. A top U.S. diplomat has said, “Virtually everyone I know in the foreign-policy-national-security area of the government is attentive to [Foreign Affairs].” Lee didn’t just want to be heard. He wanted his four thousand words to be heard by the right people. The son of the seer is worried.

  Perhaps the best and most accurate answer to how COVID-19 will shape the world comes from the late Chinese leader Zhou Enlai in 1971. He actually misspoke for he had misunderstood the question. But still, the premier’s words have become legendary, emblematic of the far-sightedness of an ambitious country. Henry Kissinger, then the U.S. national security adviser, had asked Zhou to assess the impact of the eighteenth-century French Revolution, and the premier responded, “It is too early to tell.”

  21

  From Bayreuth by train, I was to arrive in Nuremberg at 7:57 a.m. on platform 18, and then leave for Munich at 8:02 a.m. from platform 9. I was a little worried about making the connection, given how little breathing room I had afforded myself between trains. I didn’t notice that until after I had bought the ticket, probably due to itinerary fatigue, having lost count of how many hours I’d spent booking and rebooking tickets over the course of this trip. Moreover, after arriving at Munich Central Station, I still had to transfer again to get to the airport. I would arrive there with only an hour to spare before my departure. My itinerary was a tightly wound clock, with little redundancy. Any small mishap would effectively throw everything into disarray. The ticket, however, was not refundable or exchangeable, so I didn’t have much choice. I’ve
taken bigger risks for less than 45.90 euros, I thought. And if Deutsche Bahn thinks five minutes is a reasonable window to find my way across nine platforms, who am I to argue otherwise?

  The problem was I didn’t even make it to Nuremberg. In Bayreuth, I waited and waited at the station, but my train never came. I still cannot fathom how this happened, and I’ve accepted that it will be one of the great mysteries of my life, remaining forever unsolved, like why sandwich meat is round and bread square or why we crown a Miss Universe when all the contestants are from Earth — but it did happen. Whatever was written on my ticket, the time and platform at which the train was supposed to arrive, was simply not true. No train came, and I sat there getting increasingly frustrated. The ticket office at the train station, of course, was closed due to the pandemic. The only staff around was a janitor who told me I had to wear a face mask even on the platform. Like Singapore’s airports, I feel German train stations also encapsulate two prominent perceptions of the country: everything runs like clockwork, with connections tightly timed; but then once in a while, you get bureaucratic mishap, and there is no one to approach but an unyielding faceless abyss.

  One option was to go back to Elias’s apartment to regroup. But I had cleaned the place, packed everything up, and was mentally already in flight. So I decided to take my chances, albeit slim, and go to the airport nonetheless. The next train, if it did come as scheduled, would enable me to arrive at the airport literally in the last few minutes of boarding. It just might be okay. I’ve made many flights by arriving just on time, with no buffer; and with the pandemic, I wasn’t expecting any queues at the gate. I thought there was a more-than-50-per-cent chance I would still make it, and that was enough for me. I spent an additional 70.90 euros on a new ticket at the self-service machine, which I later regretted because, again due to the pandemic, there was no one around to actually check the tickets — I could have ridden free of charge, which I felt I was somehow owed because of the debacle involving the first train. That said, at least this train did show up, and on time, so off I went.