Covid Politics

 

Most. of us can probably remember dumb things we did during the 2020 covid pandemic. I can remember leaving the mail on the porch for 24 hours for the sun supposedly to kill the virus! Later, when public Masses resumed, we were required to "sanitize" the pews between Sunday Masses. Luckily the musicians took on this task and found a way to do it easily and quickly. Meanwhile, one day I went to the doctor and noticed that nobody seemed to do any thing like that to the chairs in the waiting room. I asked the doctor about it, and he sad they did it once a day, from which I concluded it obviously didn't need to be done, and this was all covid theater!

All that was bad enough, but was exacerbated by the polarized partisan divide through which all covid-era disputes came to be filtered. Holding on to tribal positions - whether on school closings or mask-wearing or whatever - has inhibited us from reexamining what worked and what didn't during the covid pandemic. The time, however, has come to do so, and perhaps - although given our polarized partisan divide that may be utopian - even to learn something which may be of service next time we face a comparable crisis.

To this end, Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have written In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press). This is a politically, as well as scientifically focused book, that is, it concerns itself with what should be done in a democracy.

For me, the big news in the book was the fact that the consensus, prior to 2020, was that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were thought to be of at best limited value. All the heroic measures that were implemented in early 2020 represented a rejection of the previous consensus by panicked officials influenced by the behavior of China, which embarked on a policy of trying to completely control the pandemic, something not previously aspired to. As the authors put it, "an authoritarian Chines government went to war with Covid, and much of the rest of the world followed. Not for the first time, elite institutions failed us." 

The draconian and restrictive policies adopted in so many places also suffered from ambiguity as to their goal. At the outset, the goal was often seen as temporary, to slow the spread of the disease, to "flatten the curve." Gradually, however, experts sought somehow to minimize the effects long-term which required keeping restrictions in place much longer. "The zero-Covid frame locked policymakers into costly, futile policies with no exit strategy."

There were actually two intersecting issues. The first was whether the various measures proposed and even mandated were actually effective, the case for which seems less than completely convincing. The second, however, is how decisions were made and what constituencies' interests were not insufficiently considered. As is now widely recognized, school closures did enormous harm to children, especially those least advantaged to begin with. And, in general, the policies adopted, while perhaps serving the interests of those the authors call "the laptop class," did not serve the interests of the disadvantaged classes who were the majority of essential workers. "A fundamental error of Covid policy  was to accord too much power to public health experts with a predictably narrow set of professional concerns and expertise, as well as perspectives shaped by comfortable, upper-middle-class material conditions."

"The central message of this book is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught. One of the greatest failures, as we have shown, was to weigh the expected coasts of policy against the expected benefits." Over and over again, we are reminded that the public-health mindset tended to consider only one narrow set of costs and benefits. Others needed to be more involved in policymaking to balance that single-minded preoccupation with other economic and social and psychological considerations. The authors are also rightly concerned "about the quality of democratic deliberation involved" and the way policy making "seems to have been driven by a profound form of short-term bias."

The great success story of the pandemic was, of course, the rapid development of a vaccine. "Vaccination rates strongly predict variation in states' covid mortality. Across the period after vaccines were available, states diverged in their outcomes, with the more highly vaccinated (more Democratic) stats suffering less disease than the less vaccinated (more Republican) states. Although vaccine uptake appears to make a big difference for states' Covid outcomes, variation in states' use of non pharmaceutical interventions before vaccines were available does not."

As for those other interventions, the negative effects of school closures were perhaps the worst. At the more individual level, we can all remember the battles over masking. Even then - indeed right from the beginning - there were questions and doubts about the efficacy of mass masking. Yet masks were mandated , and as a pastor i had to enforce that mandate. I had not objection to doing so, but that probably reflected my political allegiances as much as anything else! As with the theatrical sanitizing of seats, perhaps mask-wearing was a comfort, which enabled us to think we were doing something to protect ourselves and each other and thus made us more courageous about doing our work and engaging in other activities. 

As students of American politics, the authors note the unique aspect of federalism. They show how different states adopted different policies, and that politicians on both sides benefited. "If there is any positive spin on the U.S. response to the pandemic, it is that federalism ensured that most Americans seemingly got the policies they wanted, no matter what those policies were (and notwithstanding the lack of evidence to suggest they worked as intended.)

Covid highlighted the contentious issue of expertise in politics. "What is the proper role for experts in a democracy? Is democracy itself antithetical, as. many have argued since antiquity, to government on the basis of adequate expertise? Or can modern representative and constitutional government somehow allow for rule by the many that also draws on the expertise of the few?"

American society was already politically polarized before the pandemic, with "deep cleavages along party lines and a degraded and polarized media environment." Covid, far from uniting society in a common effort and promoting solidarity, just made polarization worse. "We need greater humility and tolerance of disagreement and more honest communication of uncertainty from public health and other experts. We need greater respect for reasonable dissent, especially when it comes from those on the other side of the political spectrum." 

Covid also "shone a harsh light on persistent inequalities in American society" which may have "had much more detrimental effects on pandemic outcomes than any differences in how non-pharmaceutical interventions were employed or enforced."

Neither polarization nor inequality were created by Covid, but their tragic toll and the renewed conflicts to address them may be the lasting legacy of that traumatic experience.