The pandemic was the major event of the early 2020s – but I wrote about it only 3 times in 2020 (here, here and here) and only once in 2023. The UK is almost unique setting up a public inquiry into Covid and the lessons learned during the period of emergency. The inquiry was established in the summer of 2022 - so has now been going for 3 years. It’s reached the seventh of its ten stages, after each producing a “module”. After 3 years, it’s hardly surprising that the public as a whole seems to have lost interest in the notion of learning anything from the experience. We each have our prejudices about what worked – and what didn’t. And it will be very difficult to get us to budge from such positions!
Yascha Mounk is not one of my favourite people – given that he was, for a period, Director of the Tony Bliar Institute. But he does an important podcast which gave us a fascinating conversation between him and the authors of what appears to be a very useful book In Covid’s Wake – how our politics failed us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee (2022) which explores how well our institutions fared during Covid
Johns Hopkins University over the summer of 2019, asked questions about the whole range of non-pharmaceutical interventions and found that there was very weak evidence to support the effectiveness of all of these non-pharmaceutical measures that would soon become familiar, including contact tracing, masking, social distancing measures of various sorts, school closures, business closures, and so on. Indeed, if they had waited a few months, they would have found that in November 2019, the World Health Organization would have issued yet another planning document surveying these non-pharmaceutical interventions in much the same way. And they would have found there too that the World Health Organization found that the evidence to support the effectiveness of all of these measures was quite weak.
In fact, they would have read that the World Health Organization
said that there were some things that were not recommended under
any circumstances, including contact tracing, border closures,
quarantine of exposed individuals. They would have found
emphatic statements that these measures would be costly, that they would impose costs, especially school closures, on children, and the less well-off. If they had looked further back, to the George W. Bush administration, they would have found debates with mathematical modelers who were more optimistic about these measures based on their models—which involved a lot of speculation about behavioral changes—and they would have found that these modelers were much more hopeful about targeted layered interventions of various sorts. If we could just pile them all on top of each other, then maybe they would work. But they would also have found in the Institute of Medicine a
letter reporting on the empirical evidence behind those optimistic accounts, warning that the evidence for these measures was not good, the costs would be high, and finally that political leaders would be tempted to implement these measures regardless, in order to show that in a crisis they were in charge and that they had things under control. Not everyone agreed with the measures – indeed it brought disputes
to many families and professions eg the evidence epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse put to the Scottish part of the inquiry The Year the World Went Mad (to which the link gives excerpts) gives a flavour. The disputes caused trouble within political parties with this article being a prime
example, referring to a book The Covid Consensus – the global assault on democracy and the poor; a view from the left by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi (2023) which, at 496 pages, was 4 times the size of an earlier version which Green (an African specialist) had published in 2021 - The Covid Consensus – the new politics of global inequality. Indeed, there seems to be a trend of some fair-minded people like John Campbell changing their minds about the treatment of Covid other examples being David Booth with these 2 articles -
Recommended Reading
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-did-we-fare-on-covid-19/
Pandemic Societies – a critical public health perspective Alan Peterson 2024 The New Futures of Exclusion – life in the Covid19 aftermath D Briggs et al (2023) Both books look to throw important light on the issue https://sandrogalea.substack.com/p/why-i-wrote-within-reason Sandro Galea 2023 The Covid Consensus – the new politics of global inequality Toby Green 2021
Shooting the Rapids – COVID19 and the long crisis of globalisation A Evans and D Steven 2020
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