Coronavirus is a reckoning for leaders around the world
While some of our world leaders are happy to accept the word of experts, others still seem to prefer magical thinking and hoping it will all go away. Which sadly, writes Tory Shepherd, only works for so long.
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The irrepressible (well, until he got a little repressed by COVID-19 recently) Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was proudly shaking hands long after the experts were warning people not to.
“I’m shaking hands continuously,” he said on March 3. “I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients. I shook hands with them and I continue to shake hands.”
A couple of weeks later, he was diagnosed with the disease himself, and we’ve all seen the graphs showing how the spread multiplies. How one sick person can spread it to hundreds, who spread it to thousands. How the choice not to go to a barbecue, or to the footy, can make all the difference.
In Tasmania, police are investigating whether a cluster of 49 cases in a hospital are linked to one “illegal” dinner party.
In the UK, one busy, handsy PM could have caused thousands of infections.
Mr Johnson has recovered. Tim Brooke-Taylor, who was my second-favourite Goodie after Bill Oddie (but only just), did not recover. Like more than 12,000 other Britons, he died of the disease. (Like many, he will have a family-only funeral. If he gets one. Some UK councils are banning them altogether.)
Pommy pundits are tracking how quickly Mr Johnson changed his mind about the danger coronavirus presents – in a matter of days he went from showing off about being touchy feely to warning of impending doom.
Of course, it’s good he changed his mind.
John Maynard Keynes, the world-changing economist, is supposed to have said “when the facts change, I change my mind”, which is utterly rational. We do like to lambaste pollies when they change positions, but if the evidence has changed, we should let them do all the backflips, half pikes, somersaults, and reverse wedgies that they like.
(Although in the case of US President Donald Trump – who is flapping around like a wacky inflatable tube man advertising cheap cars – at least some consistency would be appreciated. His own chief medical officer has conceded that lives were lost while Mr Trump fart-arsed about while he insisted, as always, that he is the best in the world. At everything).
Look around the responses of the world leaders.
There’s authoritarianism and secrecy (China), decisiveness (Finland), denial and delays (Indonesia, Italy, Iran), and wilful ignorance (Brazil).
In Australia, we initially had some low-level denialism, some downplaying. But our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, also changed his mind. It wasn’t that long ago he was looking forward to a nice game of footy. In fact, that was a couple of days before football got banned.
But he got on board with the experts, with the science, without too deadly a delay.
We’ll have learned many lessons when we emerge, blinking, into the post-COVID world. Some people are learning the secrets of baking artisanal bread, others are learning how to get through another day without murdering a family member.
I’m still trying to learn how not to touch my face 10,000 times a day.
But I’m hopeful there’ll be bigger lessons learned, too; including how to change your mind, your plan, if the evidence changes. And a restoration of faith in science – and in experts.
The first bit is particularly hard. Over centuries of evolution our wicked little brains have grown skilled at protecting themselves.
Once we form a belief, it’s very easy to cherrypick information to support it, and ignore any challenges. There is a flavour of conservatism to it, a resistance to big change.
Confirmation bias is tricky. It lets what we want influence what we believe. Some leaders wanted coronavirus to be no worse than seasonal flu. They wished so hard for that to be true that for them, it was. Wishful thinking is hardwired into our grey bits.
We’ll never know if Mr Johnson’s cavalier attitude had anything directly to do with Tim Brooke-Taylor’s death. But his delay in handling coronavirus – rejecting expert advice in favour of business as usual – certainly led to more deaths.
There will be a reckoning, after this, of which leaders clung to their delusions and which gave them up to save their people.
Once more data pours in and the modelling becomes more sophisticated, we’ll be able to see who was lacking.
To see leaders including Mr Morrison and (decisively) New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern overcome their confirmation biases is heartening.
To see leaders listening more closely to experts and the science even more so.
May it last long past the day we can open doors without slathering our hands with metho-scented sanitiser, before hugging our loved ones.