A pandemonium pandemic
Nostradamus
A Ted Talk of Bill Gates from 2015 is resurfacing on youtube, where he expresses his biggest concerns surrounding humanity’s future. It was not a gigantic nuclear war neither a heavily orchestrated world war that he was worried about but the imminent threat from the world of microscopic creatures, like bacteria, viruses holding the potential of initiating a global epidemic. It’s not just the Ted Talk, but he has been expressing his concerns over a viral outbreak quite a lot over the years. There’s an interview of him with Vox Media where he parrots the same concerns, also in CBSnews, and throughout multiple conferences like at the Munich Security Conference in Germany in 2017, where he said,
“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years” — (Forbes)
The prophecy has come out to be true, but a way lot earlier than projected. It didn’t take 10 to 15 years long as projected, but a matter of 3 years for the outbreak to arrive. Bill’s insight came from his experience with previous epidemics that wreaked havoc throughout communities, mainly Ebola, where his foundation played quite an active role, through providing aids, supporting health cares etc. The lessons from Ebola outbreak and the past outbreaks, like SARS outbreak of 2003 along with the way past ones like the Spanish flu and other global pandemics built up his insights to make such a forecast. Bill even prepared a model to simulate the number of death count and the nature of spread by a hypothetical virus, and presented it in his TED talk ( highly recommended for watching ).
But is it truly so amazing of a discovery?
No, its just some lessons from the past, and some basic maths. Many health officials, scientists, epidemiologists, and other related workers already had been aware of global pandemic outbreak. in fact, on October 2019, fairly recently before the mass outbreak of Covid-19, John Hopkins Center for Health Security organized Event 201. The details as per the event’s official website was, “A 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic.” with around 15 global business, government, and public health leaders as its players.
Also there have many been many literary works done on this. Just searching pandemic forecasts on google scholars might land you to many interesting papers. One such paper from the year 2005, tracks the possibility of an influenza outbreak,
(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arcmed.2005.05.002).
Another paper thoroughly discusses on the resource shortages, like ventilators, chicken eggs from which flu vaccines are made and probable death counts that may occur due to a viral flu outbreak
( DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp058068).
Another paper that discusses on the remergence of Sars as viral outbreak can be found here,
(doi:10.1128/CMR.00023–07)
These are one of the many instances when researchers warned us about it all. But despite all these warnings, the world just never got itself half prepared even.
Dyatlovs
Despite top professionals bringing out dozens and dozens of literature and prominent figure like Mr. Gates taking up the cue and warning the world of a viral outbreak, why weren’t perfect measures taken? One reason being that, the governors aren’t virologists, neither are the cabinet members, the stock market professionals or the businessmen. The world is modeled and shaped in terms of business. Therefore govt. officials do not bother about issues that are accompanied with uncertainties (both in terms of time and magnitude), except of course for wars. Wars are also uncertain, and in fact more uncertain than viral outbreaks. Nonetheless, military budget surpasses all the rest. This is something many prominent thinkers always pointed out, that the govt. underpays education and science while overpaying its defense. Despite numerous campaigns by prominent educators, thinkers and people alike, the govt. keeps on continuing its disproportional budget allocation as a preparation for some invisible future threat. But the driving force behind this is not sovereignty but money. The stock market is always a top priority. Hence War and Defense is the only exception where govt. loves to spend and loves to tweet too, things like “ The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World”-Donald trump.
Is military spending justifiable or not, is a different area of academic debate. But the way science gets ignored compared to this, cannot be in any way justified. Whereas US govt. can usually be seen to spend around 600 billion annually for military and 25 billion for NASA and National Science Academy combined, its no wonder that scientific progress would be comparatively slow than the pace of proxy wars here and there. When the SARS and Mars outbreak occurred, there were research grants provided to researchers to research the viruses but the fundings were soon cut out by the government after the threats started to die. The funding shortage stopped the vaccine development for these group of viruses. Private fundings stopped because they didn’t prove to economically beneficiary once the threat subsided and public fundings were cut away due to this reason along with fear of letting it go out of hand. The Obama Administration for example, feared that the ongoing research may create cause more harm than good, by producing more resilient coronavirus strains while under research process. Virologist Ralph Baric was one of such affected researchers who had to halt his research on coronaviruses due to NIH cutting away his fund, on allegation of dangerous lab experiments. Ralph Baric is just one person, there are multiple other researchers who shared the same fate of getting their funds cut midway because the investors thought the funds would fit better elsewhere.
We were always told prevention is better than cure, but precautionary measures is something our world leaders never took. Despite ongoing researches on pandemics, the world leaders didn’t hear the woes of the scientists. In fact , when Covid-19 started to originate, a Chinese professor got the hunch, that their may be a viral outbreak, which may be causede due to a new strain of coronavirus.
Li Wenliang was a doctor who warned about Sars Cov-2 through a Doctors group at We chat ( Social Media of China ). Upon knowing this, the Chinese police arrested him and 7 of his colleagues for disrupting social order through rumours. He was forced to sign an agreement by Chinese police and other medical professionals denouncing his claims as rumours. But after the outbreak really occurred, Chinese authorities finally got to see what they ignored. I have a tough time in thinking Chinese authorities as the villains in this plot because, it was the Chinese police who didn’t realize the weight of the claim of Doctor Li, not the actual administrators. in fact its pretty unusual too that the Chinese govt. didn’t cover it up with fake stories and things like that, rather they accepted their fault and even punished the police officers who led the arrest of the doctor. The Chinese officials issued an apology to his family and exonerated him from all blame. It does highlight one thing, the Chinese are thinking straight. Its not a time for politics rather than a calculated approach to solve a crisis. If the party did praise the police officer over the doctor it wouldn’t help their cause, which was to eradicate the threat of the virus from their land. The Chinese govt. got up their games straight and unlike all the other countries, it was China who was the most efficient in tackling the outbreak. Because of one thing, the priorities that china set surrounding the epidemic and the quick implementation of policies. But soon as Chinese govt. started to realize the full potential of the virus, it has started to transmit all over the world…
From Wuhan, to mainland china, to Thailand, Hong Kong… the virus started to get transmitted. Wiki has the whole timeline of the corona transmission documented, starting from 17th November till this date. But like china, no country realized the gravity of the situation and went along with its usual routine until WHO declared it as an emergency. No countries, neither WHO could realize what was coming for this world, but soon as they all did it was too late. Despite of that many country didn’t still follow suit, and as a result, the pandemic got severely spread throughout the whole world. Washington was warned by its intelligence agencies that a pandemic is going to break out after observing the nature of the outbreak. But they underplayed it. Donald Trump didn’t pay much of an attention to the report of the intelligence agencies, ignoring the scale and intensity of the outbreak that it was forecasting. The tweet below is from february 25th, when the corona wasnt spread that badly at the US, but now it tops in terms of infected count than all the rest.
In fact a list of stupid statements made by trump since corona outbreak are listed here, you can check it out,
Its not only Donald Trump alone who downplayed the pandemic’s threat, but other world leaders followed his way too, in terms of incompetency. Italian government only put a travel ban on china, keeping it’s other routes open, Spanish govt. delayed to take any action and in fact allowed a mass rally for International woman’s day with 120,000 people participating while there were a good count of infected case at that region. In fact, Irene Montero, a member who promoted this event later got tested positive for corona, irony! The Brazilian govt. is still to this day living in complete denial. Bolsonaro says that the outbreak is a fantasy and that its just a small flu that can at best induce some coughs which is tolerable. He also said that he is willing to risk some deaths to save his people from falling into the pits of unemployment. Angela Merkel focused on Refugee crisis at the borders, rather than focusing on the epidemic. But she broke her silence on this issue in the middle of march. The country started taking public actions a lot late, even in the middle of march there were pubs, clubs restaurants all open, which was afterwards ordered to be closed. But it didn’t help much, the infect count already reached around 73,217 people as per 4th of April. The iranians blame their govt. for holding elections in the midst of the crisis and also for keeping open the religious shrines all around Iran which only accelerated community transmission. Now the country is crippling with deaths due to it’s govt’s hindsight. The French govt. too didn’t pay much heed at first, it allowed its smurf convention with 3500 people gathering from all over happen, but soon after that it closed all non-essential activities but to no use, The Covid-19 positive cases are still at the top charts for france. UK too haven’t shown much of an effective response towards the virus. Up until now, UK have been operating on a faulty report that Covid-19 would be of a moderate threat to the UK. Also due to this belief, the govt. opted for her immunity strategy instead of taking straight on preventive measures. But soon, Boris Johnson tested positive for the virus and now he too realizes the importance of taking drastic actions to fight the disease. In Bangladesh, The Awami league govt. waited till 17th March for the celebration of mujib borsho which congregated a lot of people on the streets. But soon as it ended govt. went to hardline mode, announcing a countrywide lockdown.
In fact for WHO to realize the epidemic’s full potential, it took them till January 30th to declare it as a nationwide state of emergency.
One thing that this virus did show is that, the world leaders have very shallow understanding when it comes to the scientific world, their reluctant, hindsight responses to such crises therefore are bound to be accompanied with such destructive consequences.
But why this apathy towards the crisis was so common between the leaders?
Economy
Every country puts their economy as their topmost priority before anything else, because on economy a country’s socio-political order and the living quality of its people depend. If the economy is bad, there would be unemployment, low commodity productions, increasing crimes, frequent riots and many other undesired things. Also a depressing economy is a threat to the stability of a govt. Therefore for a govt. to hold power and popularity, and also in the meanwhile develop its country it has to put its economy as its first priority. Therefore it’s not a big wonder why Brazil’s President Bolsonaro is heard to say that he favours the economy over panic and hysteria. His prefers keeping his country’s economy intact, avoiding any undesired unemployment that may come along due to lockdown measures. He regards the virus as only a “little flu” which can not harm brazilians, because one, God is Brazilian and secondly, Brazilians can dive through sewers without catching the slightest thing.
It’s not just President Bolsonaro, but many us state governors and conservative think tanks, favoured economy over the pandemic which only worsened things for the US. In fact at the primary stage, Trump tweeted that corona was under control in the US. The second line of that tweet wrote Stock Market looked perfectly fine to him. That is quite self explanatory of his set of priorities in the times of a such an concerning outbreak. The Iranian regime, which was hit hard by the outbreak can be blamed for favouring economy over the outbreak too. Iranian govt. didn’t pay attention to the threats that were coming towards them, instead they kept their tourist spots open for people to visit. The reason they didn’t shut them down at the very beginning is in fear of losing tourism revenues. Also Iran didn’t want to affect its internal economic affairs, which kept the country afloat in times of an economic embargo by foreign nations. Now Iran is one of the most affected countries for corona outbreak and US Sanctions only made things worse there. But many country are bypassing US Sanction and sending over aids at Iran because of course, that’s the most sensible thing to do when a viral outbreak occurs. It needs global collaboration instead of clinging to the past political collisions.
Other countries which were hit hard by the corona like Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Australia all too hesitated at first in fear of an economic collapse. But now that fear is something the virus needed for more efficient transmission between human communities, and it succeeded in doing that. Now the cases are more than ever. Though through official reports Bangladesh wasn’t hit hard with the virus, but still one of the allegation of the people towards the government was, why they allowed mujib borsho, to be celebrated when mass gatherings were strictly discouraged by WHO. The only reason i can think why the ruling party waited to make a move till mujib borsho, is to save the economics of the whole thing. The cash flow was huge for this event and a large number of corporations, people, business institutions were involved. The estimated budget of the event was around 100 crore, most of which were already invested. Therefore, the only apparent reason for delaying in adopting the protective measures for corona until mujib borsho, may be rooted within its underlying economics. Not just these countries, But Indonesian govt., German govt. etc. all shared common attitude of negligence because of prioritizing the economics over the pandemic.
While its true that in such desperate times public heath need to be put above all, but is the economy something the world leaders and policy makers can put a blindfold to?
In India, a 21 lockdown is estimated to cost its nation around 120 billion dollars, taking out around 8.5% of its total economy. Financial times reports that US stocks fall 10% in worst day since 1987's crash. Sciencemag reports that a year long lockdown may have cost cost the US 4.2 trillion, 22% of its total GDP. and considering the death tolls, the economic costs may rise up to 6.1 trillion. Chinese industrial production fell by 13.5%. The countries or other manufacturers dependent on the Chinese line of production are therefore, passively hurt too. A report published by CNN says that nearly 80 million, half of the whole job market can get severely or moderately hit due to the economic lockdown. Italy faced a 2% plummeting on its national GDP. UN reports that the aggregated cost for the world due to the pandemic may hit 2 trillion over the year 2020. Stock markets are regularly plummeting throughout the world, in fact here in Bangladesh, in April 1st, the country’s stock market crashed to its lowest since December 11, 2014, the key index of the stocks plunging to a 4.6%.
Keeping all these mathematics aside, people have already begun to lose their jobs. Many of the garment industries are on the brinks of getting shut down as buyers are backing off from the market. If the garments sector die out, thousands and thousands of people would go unemployed in the blink of an eye. Many event organizers, tourist agencies, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, conferences, restaurant services, sporting events are going to be hugely affected. The olympics have been postponed for this year, which had a budget of around 12.6 billion. These could accommodate a lot of workers and secure a wide lot of jobs, but it isn’t going to be anymore due to the corona outbreak. The Hajj season was just ticking in for Saudi Arabia and the kingdom used to extract a giant revenue of 12 billion annually from its Hajj services. But that has become uncertain too. Pahela Baisakh, the bengali new year is just 12 days away. And prime minister sheikh hasina announced a ban on any Pahela Baisakh activity this year to tackle corona outbreak. Pahela Baisakh boosted many fashion design firms to come with fancy products, many artists found a good deal of jobs centering the festivals, also did many short businesses, media and other service providers. Shutting it down indeed would cost the nation crores of money. The same picture is everywhere, people are coming out on social media quite frequently telling their part of the stories about them losing their jobs this quarantine season.
Thus the loss of jobs translates into loss of investments, cash flows and as a result anxiety arises among people, suspicions against the system generate, riots occur, so does cases of suicide etc. Germany’s finance minister of Hesse state for example took away his own life under a running train, upon worrying about how he could save his state from the impending economic doom.
Apathy and Social Disorder
With the rise of the pandemic, and public awareness, what else rises on the parallel? Yes, Panic. The public going full nuts over a pandemic threat does not just happen in Hollywood but in real life too. With the state of emergency being declared and the governments going hard mode, announcing lockdowns everywhere, the public hurried off to their nearest stores and bought as much toilet papers and dry foods as they could so that they can easily survive the quarantine season. The local superstores soon started to get empty of their stocks and thus supply shortages arrive. People fight over the leftovers to take to their homes. These panics get so hilarious at some point that memes start to appear on social media mocking such actions. But this is a relatively mild scenario of public disorder.
In Italy, when the outbreak took a devastating toll, the Italian governors started to get too serious and through video messages and in fact coming down to the street themselves, they tried to stop people from coming out. There is a funny compilation of Italian governors mocking and warning their people to stay at home, quarantined. In fact a governor told that, he heard that a bunch of graduates were trying to hold a graduation party. He then sarcastically says that he will send over a police force with flamethrowers to cheer them up even more. You can check the rants of the mayors from here,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxtGJsnLgSc. President Duterte of Philippines even ordered the country’s security forces to shoot anyone who resists the lockdown measures of the country. He warns his people that the virus epidemic is going out of hands, and if people do not cooperate with the lockdown, they will be shot dead and buried at an instant. Now, such an authoritarian is bound to gain some criticism, but it at least shows how much panic the world leaders are currently going through.
The concerns of the mayors and the world leaders are understandable and obviously are for the greater cause. But sometimes panic takes the wrong turn. Here in Bangladesh, it has taken a very pathetic turn for some. When people started to realize the gravity of the situation after cases started to appear, the hospitals and even people in general started to get very much concerned. The state authorities started to use its police and military force to keep people out of the streets. But the panics that spread throughout the households and hospitals started to have a downside. What Bangladesh govt. failed at is at testing people at large. Whereas other countries like Germany are testing 50,000 people a day for Coronavirus, Bangladesh lacks severely in testing facility with many regions not having any testing kits even. After kit donations started to appear from china, along with imports from other places Bangladesh started to test people but on a small scale using the limited testing resources it could lay its hands on. This constraint, the lack of testing resources, started to induce fear within the doctors and also to the people to some extent. There were many doctors who got infected from treating corona patients and were sent into isolation. Such cases triggered health workers and also people in general. Therefore, when a patient with even mild fever and cough appear on hospitals, tensions start to accumulate. There were many patients who were denied treatment for which as a result they had to die. There was a woman in Dhamrai, who caught a mild cold and seeing that her husband’s home threw her out at the open. She went to her parents home where she was rejected an entry too. Then a local lawmaker found her weeping under a tree and provide her with a shelter. Many people, including children started to die due to little or mild symptoms which could get well if treated. But the panic of the corona outbreak is what got into the way. When an old person dies who may or may not have respiratory problems people initially assume it was due to coronavirus. Police come in and lockdown the whole area. But some cases were found to be not true. It’s applaudable that the police and investigative agencies are taking full on preventive measures, so that the virus cannot have any chance of an outbreak. But all these could have been avoided if proper measures were taken, like adequate testing. By this way, neither the people nor the authority would have to fall into such a panic mode, hastily locking down a whole area, which at the end may or may not pay off. There are communities who are declining the dead a proper burial let alone be allowed a modest funeral, just because in fear that he or she might have been infected by corona. Death was always a matter of huge sorrow to the Bangladeshi communities, but with the rise corona pandemic, the scenes changed from sorrow to sheer horror. People are afraid to get close to patient with mild symptoms. Treatment is a cure for this disease, but stretching out the hand to treat requires a tough gut to do. There are many heroic doctors who are working their way through it. In fact many doctors can be seen to perform funeral rituals when the local community declined to do so. Many police officers came forward too to bade a last goodbye ritual to the dead, where society refused them one. There are even many localities where the local people pressured the local hospitals to refuse any kind of corona patients, due to paranoia of the disease getting spread into their neighborhood.
Even though the doctors are putting their everything to fight the disease, many local people have not been quite so collaborative. Just out of paranoia, some hospitals were forced to refuse treatment to patients with corona symptoms by the local people. For example Regent Hospital in Uttara Sector-11, Road-17, the residents of that place collectively pressurized the hospital authority not to take in patients with corona symptoms.
I have compiled some news links below to give out a more clear picture of the apathy scenario of the people during the times of this virus outbreak :
- https://bit.ly/39FMysW
- https://bit.ly/2UAdrdu
- https://bit.ly/3aOom8Y
- https://bit.ly/2X0Jvc3
- https://bit.ly/2ylAwb8
- https://bit.ly/2UBJNoi
For the rich people and the middle range earning people the outbreak may not have caused much trouble. But for the marginally poor people its like a curse. For the day labourers, there are no work, and no work means starvation for him and his family. Upon realizing this problem, many voluntary organizations came up doing pretty heroic jobs in gathering and providing the marginal people with moderate amount of sustenance and financial aids, as much as they could afford. But that’s just not enough for the millions of marginally poor people all across the country. For this particular reason, many such labourers, especially rickshaw-pullers, van-pullers have been spotted to defy govt. order and come out just to find a customer or two. But though desperation is what brought them out, the authorities didn’t give much of a consideration and punished them like they did to everyone else. Through heavy beatings, public shaming, squatting they tried to push them back to their home. One such case surfaced around facebook where it shows that an Assistant Commissioner (Land), Sayeema, was punishing two green-grocers by making them pull their ear in front of the public for not wearing a mask. as a punishment for coming out. It caused massive outrage in social media. The outrage went so out of hand, that the higher authorities had to take action against her for misconduct with senior citizens of the country. She was soon withdrawn for her position in Jashore and transferred.
Such cases of apathy have been quite rampant and everyday a good number of such news pop up now and then. In India even, the police had gone completely hardline, beating up people whoever they find roaming on the streets. This draconian measure drew national and international criticism but the govt. says it is necessary to keep the indian people in check. Our country just followed india’s system by using police force and brutality to keep people at their homes. To what extent are the beatings justifiable is another debate, or if it is in fact in any way justifiable or not.
Communal harmony, sentiments regarding the sick and the elderly, the dead have underwent a drastic change. Racist chants against the Asian Americans have become dormant. There were Chinese migrant students getting beaten up, abused at such a large rate that social campaigns needed to be brought out to stop the blatant racism. The president of the united states fueled this problem by calling the virus “ The Chinese Virus” . Later though he withdrew his claim and sided with the Asian Americans of his country against the surge of racist attacks upon them.
On another note, Uber drivers are hesitating to take in elderly people in their cabs. A friend reported that he was denied a ride after the Uber driver got to know that another passenger would be his old grandmother. This only proves that survival had always been a primate’s first and foremost priority. If survival is brought into question all the social relations and norms start to break apart. Social relations, public norms are relevant only when everything is in order. If the order is broken, everything changes.
But in case of pandemics, a collective collaboration is how to tackle it effectively. In such moments, empathy always pays off above apathy. Apathy only hinders collaboration, but people will always be a subject to natural evolutionary response, so it might need a lot of work to come into reality.
Fake News
The times of crisis are the breeding ground of fake news and conspiracy theories. Especially people who are not quite familiar with the internet’s dynamics fall victim to the fake news and conspiracies. Also religious communities are very much easy to fool given their gullibility of faith which can be easily exploited. My friend Pritom Mojumder lays a case on why and how people are ignoring science for religious dogmas which actually have a pretty harmful impact and why this should be very big of a concern for a nation and its government. His Article:
https://medium.com/@ipritom/the-miracle-they-are-waiting-for-53ed8c6a0e39
Opening social media you will find dozens of fake news and about coronavirus and sometimes fact checking them all seems too tough of a job to do. There are a big number of religious public speakers who are continually spreading misinformation about the virus with their limited knowledge on religion and science, both. There are facebook health experts who regularly research on how to fight corona, like eating this, or eating that would give a lifetime immunity against corona. There are in fact virologists on facebook who discovered that virus lays eggs… (groundbreaking discovery!). It’s understandable since a large number of facebook users are actually not that much literate. But when literate people like professors, spread lies purposefully, it makes things get way worse. Because they have a credibility with which they can gain public trust. There were three professors from DUET, an engineering uni, who claims to have gone close to finding a cure for corona, through close studying the bacteria. But actually the findings are pretty basic fundamental high school knowledge that they presented. Also, there are researchers who claim govt. is suppressing them to release their research regarding COVID-19 because it would hurt their interests. These are worse scams as than viruses laying eggs, because the people associated are renowned professors. If people start to lose their faith on professors, there wont be much credible people left. A govt. wont suppress any propositions that may help them fight the epidemic in a more coordinated way. There is just no reason a govt. would purposefully bring destruction upon itself. Also its not just one govt. The problem is global. If someone’s research is not respected at here there are hundreds of other nations who would willfully welcome the knowledge in order to learn and design more effective policies to tackle the total outbreak. Its not like a govt. likes a country to suffer more. Because the burden would ultimately fall on their shoulders, and it would fall much harder.
There are many other interesting fake news as well. Like Russian Govt. releasing Lions on the streets to keep their people at home. Qanon supporters, and anti vaxxers saying that Bill gates created the coronavirus. They even go as far as telling that the gatesfoundation has the vaccines ready and waiting for the right moment to launch them. Because there is big money in vaccines. Many theorists claim that Event 201 was a preparation for the Gates, with other deep state leaders for launching corona epidemic just after the conference.
But the most popular conspiracy theory has to be the one relating to china. That china invented the virus at a lab at Wuhan to start out a Biowarfare. They purposefully infected a little portion of their people with the virus for credibility and after that they helped spreading the virus throughout the world. China perfectly contained the pandemic threat, while other nations succumbed to it. Therefore, conspiracy theorists claim it was all preplanned, hence china could curb out its damage even thought it was originated there. They claim that its a way to win the economic war over other countries, by damaging them totally and buying most of their stocks at low price.
These are all just connecting dots, which is a primary requirement for a conspiracy to make sense, even though the dots aren’t meant to be connected and have any meaning at all. If so, then the probability of a religious leader to pay a chinese guy to eat bat soup to halt this year’s Pahela Baisakh festival also holds true. There were multiple researches done, all of them are now in public access domain, which shows strong evidence for the novel coronavirus to have originated from wildlife animals, especially from Horseshoe Bats. Also there are conspiracies like intentional corona outbreaks have a connection with 5G radio spectrum tests, then, Simpsons, and a book of Dean Koontz both predicting coronavirus outbreak beforehand etc. are to name few of the many. Also many republican figures, claiming the outbreak as scams, or something not to remotely worry about because they are not SARS would be one of my honourable mentions.
In this atmosphere of rampant fake news, only credible and well reputed news outlets should be trusted, especially internationally acclaimed ones. The rest should all be taken with a grain of salt. Because fake news also has a destructive pandemic potential if it can steer the people wrong. Like if such a fake news can convince all people to come down the street, start riots and bring down their governments for lying to them, the scenario won’t be pleasing rather the death toll would only exponentially accelerate instead of the corona curve getting flattened down.
A perfect fake news can act just like SARS Cov-2, given the right amount of negligence by the policy makers and given a widespread among ignorant hosts.
Remedies
As of yet the coronavirus vaccine would take years to arrive down our door, so the only way to tackle it is through non vaccine strategies. Social isolation and country wide lockdown are to be implemented but not mindlessly. The virus’s wont die just die off altogether after quarantine ends. There needs to be tests, tests and tests. Contact tracing is sth that helped eradicating SARS, and it helped countries like china, Australia, Sweden flatten out their curves. China had shown the world how perfectly it handled the situation. UK wanted to implement herd immunity among its people, but until that works, countless morgues would be on the streets, therefore Boris Johnson and the UK authorities are moving towards the conventional ways now. The problem with Bangladesh is, it doesn’t have much testing kits in its possession. So the country authorities are enforcing lockdowns and quarantines. The country extended its lockdown period, but that wont help much unless large scale testing and contact tracing are introduced. The virus may flare up once again, after the lockdown period ends. Lockdowns help to flatten the curve, not kill it. To kill the curve, once needs to confine the virus, shrink at and eliminate it. This can be achieved by contact tracing.To learn more about how contact tracing works you can jump onto WHO’s website from here : https://www.who.int/features/qa/contact-tracing/en/
The ports need to tighten up security for all classes of people, test anyone before they are allowed to enter Bangladeshi soil, even for the VVIPs, considering that no one is immune from the virus’s spikes. But that’s something i am heavily doubtful of, because the loopholes in this country’s legal system are huge. If again corona cases start to appear then it would be a big R.I.P to the country, unless the country can get a grasp on contact tracing before its too late.
Meritocracy vs Democracy
Though the world favours western styled democracy over any other system but this pandemic showed the world otherwise. China could be successful for tackling the virus for one reason, which is it’s meritocratic authoritarianism. China follows a meritocratic leadership with its leaders being professionals of their specific departments. This allowed chinese govt. to foresee and realize the gravity of the pandemic. The authoritarian system of the chines govt. spares itself from bureaucratic hassles which other countries like the US has to go through. Therefore, chines authorities could jump into immediate actions soon as the problem broke out. Whereas US lawmakers asked people to stay home, they cant force them because it would go against their constitution. The people went to superstores to buy and hoard supplies, but in china it could never be possible at the first place. Soon as the govt. ordered home confinement everybody had to stay at home, if they were even caught to go to the shop, they would have been punished and get a lowered social credit score. But the chinese authorities ensured that everyone got their hands on necessary supplies whenever they needed staying at home. Just an order through the phone and things were in front of the door in no time. But that required a huge lot of voluntary work. For that reason, chinese govt. called for and took in thousands of volunteers from every profession. They were divided into hospital helps, delivery men, contact tracers and into some other groups. The coordinated efforts of all this people is how china could perfectly tackle the epidemic. Such large scale public collaboration was not seen in other places for which containing the virus, flattening the curve took much longer. The bureaucracy of the US has also seen to fail at this point, with the highest number of corona cases being in the US and a large projected death in near future. This is one of the reasons that some people are rethinking their take on democracy because of its efficacy in such crisis moment. But lets not jump into any hasty decision so soon because remember? Big Brother is watching you? Would you like to stay in such a dystopia because of fear of pandemics?
Creeping authoritarianism
Professor Yuval Noah Harari, a notable scholar and author of the best selling books: Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 lessons for 21st Century wrote for the financial times showing his concerns about the post-corona world and it’s power dynamics. Professor Harari states that, in a post-corona world, the leaders would have a shot at legitimizing emergency power act whenever they feel its needed. Now, while emergency acts are indeed important in some case, like epidemics, but it also is on the other hand a slippery slope to authoritarianism. Mass surveillance systems for example has been undertaken by many governments to tackle the pandemic. But mass surveillance system is an authoritarian trait, china is one the biggest examples for that. China monitors its every citizen, from home to work to everywhere. The data it collects from its citizen are used to keep them in control and also to consolidate the power of the Chinese Communist Party. While the chinese surveillance systems are a violation to privacy and civil rights, in other countries, where chinese policies were unthinkablle are gradually starting to take root. Now, the question is, how long would the roots be allowed to last? Professor Harari fears that it may last or pop up now and then whenever the leader wants it to, especially when his power is threatened. The surveillance system that are used to target, trace corona patients by extracting their health measurements, can be also used by the govt. to track and manipulate voters, shape their thoughts through target advertising, trace potential protesters and eliminate probable power threats. As professor harari put in the financial times,
The downside is, of course, that this would give legitimacy to a terrifying new surveillance system. If you know, for example, that I clicked on a Fox News link rather than a CNN link, that can teach you something about my political views and perhaps even my personality. But if you can monitor what happens to my body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate as I watch the video clip, you can learn what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, and what makes me really, really angry.
It is crucial to remember that anger, joy, boredom and love are biological phenomena just like fever and a cough. The same technology that identifies coughs could also identify laughs. If corporations and governments start harvesting our biometric data en masse, they can get to know us far better than we know ourselves, and they can then not just predict our feelings but also manipulate our feelings and sell us anything they want — be it a product or a politician. Biometric monitoring would make Cambridge Analytica’s data hacking tactics look like something from the Stone Age. Imagine North Korea in 2030, when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day. If you listen to a speech by the Great Leader and the bracelet picks up the tell-tale signs of anger, you are done for.
You could, of course, make the case for biometric surveillance as a temporary measure taken during a state of emergency. It would go away once the emergency is over. But temporary measures have a nasty habit of outlasting emergencies, especially as there is always a new emergency lurking on the horizon. My home country of Israel, for example, declared a state of emergency during its 1948 War of Independence, which justified a range of temporary measures from press censorship and land confiscation to special regulations for making pudding (I kid you not). The War of Independence has long been won, but Israel never declared the emergency over, and has failed to abolish many of the “temporary” measures of 1948 (the emergency pudding decree was mercifully abolished in 2011).
Even when infections from coronavirus are down to zero, some data-hungry governments could argue they needed to keep the biometric surveillance systems in place because they fear a second wave of coronavirus, or because there is a new Ebola strain evolving in central Africa, or because . . . you get the idea. A big battle has been raging in recent years over our privacy. The coronavirus crisis could be the battle’s tipping point. For when people are given a choice between privacy and health, they will usually choose health.
To add to professor harari’s examples, one need not dig far. After three to four days from president duterte’s order to shoot lockdown defiants, the first shot was fired by philippine’s police force against a 63 year old citizen of the country for defying lockdown measures.
This sparked mixed response from the internet. People were divided on Duterte’s strategies. Some have shown heavy supports for Duterte’s decision, even people who are not supporters of an authoritarian government. But the support stems from the realization that govt. needs to go hardcore to tackle the pandemic, because ignorance of many citizens may result in the casualties of others. But little do they realize, that when a leader is allowed to make such unconstitutional moves, he will practice it even further using this instance as a justification for the future. Also, no matter what happens, a country’s govt. should not be allowed to point guns towards its citizens, unless the person holds other people as hostages, threatens lives. If a country’s citizens cant feel safe against it’s government then the government turns no less scary the North Korean one Where the government is not for the people, but the people are for the government.
Duterte is just an instance out of the many. Hungary’s far right prime minister, Victor Orban has been following similar strategies but in different ways. The end goals being same for both, that is to consolidate their power in the office. Recently, Orban won 137 to 53 votes in the Hungarian Parliament for emergency rule by decree, with regards to the sweeping corona outbreak across Europe. Rule by Decree means to legislate emergency rules by a person or a group to address an issue without having to face any opposition. it is one of the traits of the Autocratic governments. Dictators, Military Leaders, or Monarchs work with such style of governance. While Victor’s government states that it is needed for emergency crisis response but his oppositions do raise some valid concerns. One concern being that, there is no time period to the emergency decree. The Hungarian PM can continue the emergency order as long as he wants. As much as it is threatening to the existence and operation of Hungary’s Opposition Party, it is a terrible news for the media outlets too. Many news agencies have already packed their bags and stopped plans for 2020. Mostly because Orban, since he came into power have tried to control media, leveraging the loyal ones to the government and boosting them up, suppressing the rest. Now with this indefinite amount of power, he can easily try to persecute and suppress the media he doesn’t like. He has also been accused of manipulating the heritage and history of his country to fit to his party’s agenda. So, amidst his far right power growth, an emergency decree only adds fire to the fuel.
In Israel, when president Netanyahu orders emergency decrees it raises concerns among the concerned citizen, since Netanyahu has lost his recent elections and is now among the under-representatives in the parliament. Under the pretext of the crisis, Netanyahu suspended the country’s parliament, saying that its an emergency measure that needed to be taken to fight the virus. Professor harari says, where netanyahu’s rivals secure most of the parliamentary seats, are on their way to form a government, netanyahu’s emergency measures mean only one thing, that the country is moving towards a dictatorship. Netanyahu also suspended the courts of the country, under the pretext of corona emergency, which also aids to his causes. Netanyahu was being charged by the court for corruption and corona gave him a good excuse to delay the court proceedings and grant him some more time to figure things out. The New York Times has an excellent article on this, which i highly recommended to check.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/world/middleeast/israel-virus-netanyahu.html
In India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, government has resorted to police brutality to enforce the lockdown measures. Though the country officials may give excuses such as the tons of ignorant people need policing in order to properly behave but this is also a slippery slope to an emerging police state. Many people have been viciously beaten by the police and armed forces, especially people who are poor and living under the poverty line, who couldn’t manage but had to go out in search for some living. The inhumane suffering of the poor should have led to some consideration by the police force, but brutality is only what befell upon them.
Countries like Peru, Zimbabwe and a lot other are facing similar crisis, especially where the leaders have questionable intents, all of which can be trailed back to the past. It is in times of emergency crises only when dictators can have an opportunity to grab and secure indefinite power over the people, without anyone noticing much. Hitler rose in the midst of the crisis led by world war 1. The Islamic terror groups used civil unrest in their countries and filled up the power vacuum, Turkey’s Erdogan consolidated his power after the military coup in his country, Khomeini secured his power in iran due to the Shah regime’s crisis. Thus any sort of crisis is a vital requirement for authoritarians to secure and bolster their power. In this case corona offers such an opportunity to the world leaders and it is a matter of time till someone realizes the potential of such offer and utilizes it to the max.
But what can be done then? We cannot definitely leave emergency crisis response in order to save democracy, because people needs to live first. But for people to live its not necessary to give up democracy altogether. Countries like South Korea, Singapore etc. have shown marvelous performance in battling the situation. To tackle the pandemic, the thing that is needed is a mass level cooperation and mass public awareness. And another thing that is eqaully important is for the government to gain public trust. The lack of trust is what fails a government to raise awareness among its people. People just don’t believe them. But in Singapore the scenario is different and it aided them to largely cooperate. As a result their curve didn’t take off in a worse direction. If we can educate people about the basics, there would be no need for mass surveillance and undemocratic policies to be adopted where there would be tons of other viable, democratic options available. Professor Harari gave out this solution and to me it seemed the most logical approach to address such a situation so far. You can read his full insight in the Financial times.
https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75
To conclude this section, i would like to quote Susie Novat’s take on democracy’s demise,
Democracies don’t die in one day. As you see in Europe, they can decline or erode, bit by bit, and you don’t really feel it. It’s like a smoke bomb. You don’t see very clearly, and then things change quickly, without you taking notice.
So what pill are you willing to take? The emergency autocratic response? or the civil right activist’s response?