Europe’s Vanishing COVID ‘Success’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 29, 2020

 

In the Czech Republic, the government is building emergency field hospitals out of fear that the health-care system will be overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. With new reported cases exceeding 15,000 a day at the end of October, the Czechs were suffering the highest per capita infection rate in the world except for tiny Andorra. France reached the landmark of more than 1 million new cases after President Emmanuel Macron declared a new national emergency and imposed a nationwide curfew; Spain saw more than 1 million new cases, too, and imposed similar measures. Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom have been at record infection rates. The president of Poland has tested positive. Ireland has reinstated a partial national lockdown. By late October, the overall infection rate in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom had been increasing for three months, rising to 249.8 per 100,000.

 

Things looked different over the summer. While the United States thrashed about, making culture-war issues out of masks and emergency measures, the Euro­peans and the British seemed — for a while — to have had a relatively steady hand on the tiller. The epidemic was a blow to sentimental notions of a truly united Europe — open borders were one of the first casualties, and the initial response to the epidemic was led by national governments acting not only independently of EU institutions but often counter to their advice. But those national responses were in many cases credible and seemingly effective: Germany, with its highly regarded public-health system — and its Germanness — seemed to lead the way, with a testing-and-distancing regime under which it fared better on both the economic and the medical front than did many of its neighbors and other advanced countries.

 

While Europe seemed to have things figured out, the United States was struggling. As European countries began reopening their borders to tourists and other travelers, visitors from China, Cuba, and Uganda were welcomed, but Americans were judged to be too high-risk. While the EU countries were seeing a daily average of 14 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 population, the United States was at more than 100 new daily cases per 100,000. The decision seemed to be a prudent one.

 

But Europe may not have been conservative enough. There was tremendous economic pressure to reopen to tourism and to allow venues such as restaurants and museums to reopen, and it was believed that masking, distancing, and other commonsense measures would be sufficient to keep the rate of new infections under control. More intensive efforts were reserved for infection hotspots. But that approach has proved insufficient, and the virus returned across Europe with striking suddenness. In Belgium, local governments are worried about being able to put enough police officers on the streets, and medical workers who have tested positive for the virus but are asymptomatic have been asked to return to work for fear that sidelined doctors and nurses will leave facilities unable to meet the demand for treatment.

 

While they have their differences, from one point of view the European and U.S. approaches have more in common with one another than they do with the (apparently) more successful (at this moment) programs implemented in much of East Asia. The difference, to put it in stark terms: Big Brother. Or, to put it in less dramatic terms, a less capacious view of individual autonomy and a readier acceptance of the subjugation of the individual interest to the social interest. It is easy for Western­ers to slip into stereotypes about orderly Confucian collectivists happily submitting to the Son of Heaven, but consider some of the measures that have been implemented in Asia: The majority of Asian-Pacific countries remain effectively closed to foreign tourists, even though this has imposed heavy costs on politically sensitive businesses; visitors to many Asian-Pacific destinations (Hong Kong, South Korea, New Zealand) are subjected to mandatory two-week quarantines — and, unlike in the West, these quarantines are enforced. In the United Kingdom, one study found that three-fourths of those told to quarantine because of COVID-19 exposure left isolation after a few days. Singapore arrests quarantine violators and those who fail to comply with social-distancing rules.

 

The return to a semblance of “normal life” in Seoul, for example, means a return to a life that would be far from normal for Americans, including heavy surveillance: Public-health authorities have access to every­thing from cell-phone data to security-camera footage to aid in their contact-tracing programs; those entering bars and movie theaters are made to scan QR codes so that any transmission happening through such venues can be traced. In late summer, South Korea experienced a small spike in new cases and imposed a snap shutdown, keeping new daily cases below 500.

 

In May, Chinese authorities tested the entire population of Wuhan — 11 million. After a small outbreak (a dozen cases clustered around a testing facility) in Qingdao, authorities announced that they would test the entire population of 9 million in just five days.

 

Compare these measures to what happened in the United States in the early days of the epidemic. The Trump admini­stration made the right decision in suspending flights from China, and Joe Biden et al. were wrong (and viciously dishonest) to denounce this as an excessive display of xenophobia. It wasn’t — it was, in a sense, an insufficient display of xenophobia: It shouldn’t have been limited to China, for one thing, and it probably wasn’t invasive enough in that those returning from abroad were not quarantined. President Trump was focused on China as a punitive measure and a political concern, but the interests of public health would have been better served by a more encompassing response.

 

None of which would sit very well with the American temperament.

 

China is a totalitarian gulag state. Singa­­pore is a parliamentary democracy with some pretty heavy-handed habits and traditions. South Korea is a presidential democracy with some pretty heavy-handed habits and traditions. But New Zealand is a liberal democracy with a thriving free-market economy, the reasonably satisfied electorate of which has re­elected the left-wing government of Jacinda Ardern largely on the strength of her leadership of the country’s (seemingly) effective (at the moment) anti-epidemic measures. New Zealand has a distinct political culture and distinct traditions, of course, but these are not nearly as alien to the American mode of life as is the brutal modus vivendi under Beijing. If there is something to be learned from the experiences of other countries — something that might be useful in the American context — then New Zealand is one place where we might focus our investigations.

 

But it may be that there is nothing to learn. It may be that we do not have much of an intellectual handle on the long-term course of this epidemic, that the second waves hitting Europe and the United States are simply the result of factors mainly exogenous to public-health policy, and that what’s happening in Belgium and Illinois today is going to be happening in Singapore and Auckland tomorrow. We are being tested, and the test is far from over.