The Big Power Syndrome

There is little doubt that the West is failing in its fight against the coronavirus. Western countries have seen more cases, more deaths, and more chaotic lockdowns.

There are three main ways we have chosen to combat this pandemic:

1. The closing of borders and travel restrictions
2. Quarantine
3. Lockdowns and social-distancing measures

A study in New Zealand found that, unsurprisingly, faster implementation and longer durations of sustained harsh lockdown measures yielded the greatest reductions in the reinfection rate of the virus.[1] This is something that many articles argue that Asian countries achieved, whilst the West took its time to react.

Asian countries have been widely praised for their swift and successful response to the coronavirus. If we compare Taiwan and Italy, who recorded their first cases of coronavirus on the same day, we see that today, Taiwan has 19 cases per million of the population, whereas Italy has suffered 3919 cases per million of the population. While it may be unfair to compare two such different countries, it does seem that countries which experienced the SARS pandemic have dealt vastly better with the current crisis than their Western counterparts. According to Emma Graham-Harrison, the memory of SARS made governments faster to react, but equally the public more compliant in following the rules.[2]

It’s not just Asian countries that have taken lessons from SARS (and indeed Mers and ebola). The West also learnt not to worry about pandemics, gambling on the disease being contained elsewhere. Professor Steve Taylor said that it was a question of governments weighing up the chances of them being seriously affected by the virus. If they had responded swiftly, and the virus wasn’t a real threat, then they would have been criticised for overreacting. So instead, they waited, moving slowly, and instead have been criticised for underreacting.[3]

3,919

Explaining the western mentality, former IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan said, “I think in the West, partly because there hadn't been a direct experience of a serious epidemic, it was taken a little more lightly. […] This is something happening in faraway lands, it's not going to be serious here.”[4]

As you can see, most of the articles that I’ve seen about this focus on the West versus Asia. It’s the classic Western bias that considers that Europe tapers off after Germany and picks up again in Russia. Rajan was comparing the West and Asia – but what about Central and Eastern European countries, which also didn’t experience SARS, yet still have dealt with the pandemic much better than their Western neighbours? The first European coronavirus-free state was Montenegro – surprising if you consider that Montenegro has one of the lowest GDPs on the continent, whilst seven out of the G8 members have made it onto the list of the 20 countries with the highest cumulative COVID-19 cases. My theory is that this has less to do with whether or not a country has experienced a serious epidemic in recent history, and more to do with the size of its ego. Having spoken many a time about this topic with my Eastern European friends, I think there is something to be said for a general lack of confidence in a country’s ability to deal with a serious epidemic. You don’t necessarily need an epidemic in your national memory to believe that the institutions of your country would crumble under the weight of one. What the Asian and Eastern European countries share is an understanding that they are not invincible, something that the West is seriously lacking. I would therefore like to talk about a phenomenon I call the Big Power Syndrome.

So how is that Eastern European countries have done so well? Some of it has been luck. Italy and the UK had their first infections in January, whereas the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia logged their first cases in March. Despite this, lockdown was implemented rapidly in CEE, while in many Western European states, public gatherings were still taking place in late March. The UK allowed 70,000 people to gather each of the five days of the Cheltenham horseracing festival, and on the 7th of March the French focussed their attentions on breaking the record for the largest gathering of people dressed as smurfs.[5] Meanwhile, Montenegro started implementing preventative measures on the 10th of March. CEE governments saw what was happening in Italy and closed their borders, something many Western countries are yet to do. For example, Poland closed its borders when it had just 68 cases.[6] Sir Patrick Vallance has even admitted that not closing borders brought waves of the virus into the UK – Britain quarantined just 273 out of 18.1 million arrivals in the three months before the lockdown - and yet still borders remain open.[7] What’s more, the wearing of facemasks is obligatory in much of Central and Eastern Europe. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia this measure was implemented very early on, with examples set by the Slovak PM and journalists, whilst in Britain only a fraction of the population is currently wearing masks.

So why did CEE countries act so fast? For fear of underfunded and struggling healthcare systems being overwhelmed.[8]

“The likes of Sweden and the UK had a greater sense that they could weigh up a range of policy choices rather than being bounced by the situation into preventing an absolute meltdown of their healthcare systems.” - Ben Stanley, a political scientist at Warsaw’s SWPS University.[9]

The WHO ranks countries according to the efficiency of their healthcare systems (according to responsiveness, fairness of funding and the health of the population). I therefore decided to compare the efficiency of European healthcare systems with the date each country closed its borders, expecting to see a clear link between better healthcare systems and a delay in closing borders. As I sat in my bed, typing the last figures into the Excel sheet which I had been working on for the last several hours, I was excited to see what tantalising new scientific discovery I might have made. Instead, on pressing enter for the last time, I was met with this rather disappointing graph.

My suspicions were incorrect, there doesn’t seem to be any clear link between the efficiency of a healthcare system and the speed at which borders were closed. This graph is of course an over-simplification: global indices rarely make large distinctions between European countries as we are all relatively similar when compared to the rest of the world (a theory I developed at the end of writing a 10-page paper comparing democracy in Britain and Ireland, deciding there were vastly different, only to discover that there was less than a point’s difference between them on the Economist’s Democracy Index); and what’s more, the date at which borders were closed says nothing of the other measures in place, nor the severity of these measures.

However, my failure of a graph did force me to reconsider my analysis. Maybe this is more than just about healthcare efficiency – maybe this about the confidence people have in their systems and more complex historical and institutional issues which lead to certain decisions faced with crises. This would explain why some CEE countries who rank highly on the WHO index still quickly introduced strict measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus (of which Albania is an example). As explains Ivan Krastev, “It was exactly the fact we felt vulnerable about our healthcare system that made people follow the lockdown. It’s because you don’t trust the system,”.[10]

So, what? Is it something in the former Eastern-Bloc mentality? Take Sweden and Germany. Although both very wealthy countries, and ranking 23rd and 25th on the WHO index,[11] Sweden has a broadly lackadaisical attitude in its fight against he coronavirus. It is currently logging over four times as many deaths per million of the population than Germany. Interestingly, in Germany, the five states which were previously entirely in East Germany are all in the bottom six (of 16) for virus cases per head.[12] This may be because of the lower population density of East German states, but I wonder what the impact is on the mentality of a population who has a weaker economy to its Western counterpart, and a recent history of following the rules or facing the Stasi.

That being said, arguments that a socialist or Communist past is behind the rapid response of CEE countries to the pandemic must be nuanced. After increasing border control relatively early, Russia suffered delusions that the coronavirus could be contained outside of Russia, that she was in some way immune to the crisis. The difference between Russia and other countries previously behind the Iron Curtain is that Russia is a global superpower. It is suffering from the same blind confidence that the West is.

I have already mentioned the Western bias in how we have reported on the success in CEE. However, this colonialist confidence might also be behind why we didn’t act fast enough, but our Eastern counterparts did. In the West, we were confident that our institutions could take it – we were more fearful for our economies. So we were, and are, complacent.

“We are doing very well,” Igor Matovic, Slovakia’s prime minister, said in a press conference.[13] What must it feel like to live in a country where you know that that isn’t a lie?

Annex

Top 20 highest number of cumulative COVID-19 cases
Country	Organisation
1.       USA	G7
2.       Brazil	G20
3.       Russia	G8
4.       India	G20
5.       UK	G7
6.       Spain
7.       Italy	G20
8.       Peru
9.       Germany	G7
10.   Iran
11.   Turkey	G20
12.   Chile
13.   France	G7
14.   Mexico	G20
15.   Pakistan
16.   Saudi-Arabia	G20
17.   Canada	G7
18.   China	G7
19.   Bangladesh
20.   Qatar

 

Overall efficiency in all WHO member states
Rank	Member State	Index	Uncertainty Interval
1	France	0.994	0.982	-	1.000
2	Italy	0.991	0.978	-	1.000
3	San Marino	0.988	0.973	-	1.000
4	Andorra	0.982	0.966	-	0.997
5	Malta	0.978	0.965	-	0.993
7	Spain	0.972	0.959	-	0.985
9	Austria	0.959	0.946	-	0.972
11	Norway	0.955	0.947	-	0.964
12	Portugal	0.945	0.931	-	0.958
13	Monaco	0.943	0.929	-	0.957
14	Greece	0.933	0.921	-	0.945
15	Iceland	0.932	0.917	-	0.948
16	Luxembourg	0.928	0.914	-	0.942
17	Netherlands	0.928	0.914	-	0.942
18	United Kingdom	0.925	0.913	-	0.937
19	Ireland	0.924	0.909	-	0.939
20	Switzerland	0.916	0.903	-	0.930
21	Belgium	0.915	0.903	-	0.926
23	Sweden	0.908	0.893	-	0.921
24	Cyprus	0.906	0.879	-	0.932
25	Germany	0.902	0.890	-	0.914
31	Finland	0.881	0.866	-	0.895
34	Denmark	0.862	0.848	-	0.874
38	Slovenia	0.838	0.813	-	0.859
43	Croatia	0.812	0.782	-	0.837
48	Czech Republic	0.805	0.781	-	0.825
50	Poland	0.793	0.762	-	0.819
54	Venezuela, Bolivarian	0.775	0.745	-	0.803
55	Republic of Albania	0.774	0.709	-	0.834
62	Slovakia	0.754	0.721	-	0.781
66	Hungary	0.743	0.713	-	0.768
70	Turkey	0.734	0.698	-	0.764
72	Belarus	0.723	0.691	-	0.750
73	Lithuania	0.722	0.690	-	0.750
77	Estonia	0.714	0.684	-	0.741
79	Ukraine	0.708	0.674	-	0.734
89	The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia	0.664	0.630	-	0.695
90	Bosnia and Herzegovina	0.664	0.632	-	0.694
99	Romania	0.645	0.624	-	0.666
101	Republic of Moldova	0.639	0.600	-	0.672
102	Bulgaria	0.639	0.617	-	0.660
105	Latvia	0.630	0.589	-	0.665
125	Brazil	0.573	0.526	-	0.619
130	Russian Federation	0.544	0.527	-	0.563

 

Bibliography

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[1] Binny, R., Hendy, S., James, A., Lustig, A., Plank, M. and Steyn, N., 2020. Effect Of Alert Level 4 On R Eff : Review Of International COVID-19 Cases. [online] Te Punaha Matatini. Available at: <https://cpb-ap-se2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.auckland.ac.nz/dist/d/75/files/2020/04/InternationalReffReview_FullReport_21Apr_FINAL2.pdf> [Accessed 12 June 2020].

[2] Graham-Harrison, E., 2020. Experience Of Sars A Key Factor In Countries’ Response To Coronavirus. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/15/experience-of-sars-key-factor-in-response-to-coronavirus> [Accessed 12 June 2020].

[3] Graham-Harrison, E., 2020. Coronavirus: How Asian Countries Acted While The West Dithered. [online] The Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/21/coronavirus-asia-acted-west-dithered-hong-kong-taiwan-europe> [Accessed 12 June 2020].

[4] BBC News. 2020. Ex-IMF Head Economist: Western Economies Slow To React. [online] Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52239974> [Accessed 12 June 2020].

[5] Jones, S. and Shotter, J., 2020. How Central And Eastern Europe Contained Coronavirus. [online] Financial Times. Available at: <https://www.ft.com/content/f9850a8d-7323-4de5-93ed-9ecda7f6de1c> [Accessed 13 June 2020].

[6] Stickings, T., 2020. Europe's East-West Divide On Coronavirus Cases. [online] Mail Online. Available at: <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8292239/Europes-East-West-divide-coronavirus-cases-eastern-countries-close-borders.html> [Accessed 13 June 2020].

[7] ibid

[8] Walker, S. and Smith, H., 2020. Why Has Eastern Europe Suffered Less From Coronavirus Than The West?. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/why-has-eastern-europe-suffered-less-from-coronavirus-than-the-west> [Accessed 13 June 2020].

[9] ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Tandon, A., Murray, C., Lauer, J. and Evans, D., 2020. MEASURING OVERALL HEALTH SYSTEM PERFORMANCE FOR 191 COUNTRIES. GPE Discussion Paper Series, [online] (30), pp.1-23. Available at: <https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf> [Accessed 13 June 2020].

[12] Stickings, T., 2020. Europe's East-West Divide On Coronavirus Cases. [online] Mail Online. Available at: <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8292239/Europes-East-West-divide-coronavirus-cases-eastern-countries-close-borders.html> [Accessed 13 June 2020].

[13] Jones, S. and Shotter, J., 2020. How Central And Eastern Europe Contained Coronavirus. [online] Financial Times. Available at: <https://www.ft.com/content/f9850a8d-7323-4de5-93ed-9ecda7f6de1c> [Accessed 13 June 2020].