West’s weaknesses writ large: we must do better on coronavirus

Question: how is the world coping with coronavirus?

Answer: Not very well.

Consider: there are three men who might be president of the United States after November. One, Bernie Sanders, will be 79 then and had a heart attack five months ago. One, Joe Biden, is 77 and seems incapable of uttering a sentence with two clauses that makes sense. The third, the young pup of the group, Donald Trump, a mere stripling of 73, is grossly overweight.

So these three men are in the second-highest risk category for COVID-19. Death rates for men over 80 who catch it are 15 per cent, according to widely reported estimates. Luckily for the free world, it’s only 8 per cent for men in their 70s. Unless, of course, they have serious pre-existing chronic health problems, such as heart conditions, obesity or even perhaps cognitive decline indicating feebleness.

The health advice for men in their 70s with such pre-existing conditions is to stay home, keep warm and avoid human contact.

Yet these three elderly gentlemen cannot stop kissing and hugging, shaking hands 500 times a day and attending as many mass rallies as their teams can organise.

America’s early response to COVID-19 was poor. There was no coercion, but Washington nonetheless repeated Beijing’s early mistakes. It tried to talk down the problem and control the message, rather than confront the reality. Since then, it’s got better, but it’s still messy.

This crisis is almost biologically evolved to exaggerate Trump’s weaknesses and evade his strengths. Trump has succeeded in his presidency by cutting taxes and regulation, invigorating the economy, boosting defence and pursuing his priorities ruthlessly. He has succeeded politically by talking up the economy and talking down his opponents. He paints the big picture and sometimes the brushstrokes get mixed up.

This crisis uniquely calls for calm, authoritative leadership, precision in language, accuracy in detail and as far as possible a bipartisan spirit. It requires the government to extend healthcare to everyone, not only as a matter of equity but to control the spread of the disease. It also requires some degree of regulation and intervention in the labour market.

Trump could be facing, as others have suggested, his own Hurricane Katrina moment, while the economy faces a hit bigger than the global financial crisis. COVID-19 could conceivably do to Trump what impeachment and the Democrats have failed utterly to do — hurt him politically, by hurting the US economy.

To Trump’s credit, America is richer than it would be without him, and when you have the resources you can turn them to anything, including public health. His stimulus package looks smart. This is no time for half-measures.

That’s the great contrast with Europe. The EU’s economic model is so inefficient and ineffective that its economic growth is pitiful and has been for a decade or more. No big European economy has been more of a mess than that of Italy. Partly as a result, Italy’s health system is grievously run down.

There are not enough intensive-care beds, not enough respirators, not enough surgical masks, not enough protective gear for doctors. Yet everyone has known of epidemics and their potential for years — were they asleep for SARS, MERS and avian flu? The coronavirus first hit hard in the north of Italy. Yet civic leaders there have been saying the healthcare system is on the brink of collapse.

Now the whole of Italy is in lockdown. What happens if the virus gets as bad in the poorer south of Italy as it is in the richer north?

Italy and Germany are probably in recession now. France and Germany are refusing to take steps remotely on a par with the crisis next door to both of them. Are they sensibly avoiding panic, or foolishly avoiding necessary preparation?

The EU is mired in a host of paralysing contradictions. Britain’s decision to leave never looked more sensible. The EU has free internal movement but no common health rules, one currency but no unified economic policy, porous external borders and a determination by some member countries to control their own borders no matter what.

Australia has imposed direct travel bans on China, Iran and South Korea. Why not on Italy? Could it be because anyone in Italy wanting to fly to Australia could just drive across the border, not have their passport stamped, and then leave from a non-Italian European airport?

Incidentally, COVID-19 challenges aspects of globalisation in radical ways. Economists seldom acknowledge but sometimes understand that it is possible to make transaction costs too small. Capital entirely free to flee tends to become flighty. People entirely free sometimes move too much. It is not a God-given right that a passport is never examined at a border. Clearly, this flow of Euro-bodies imposes externalities, costs on innocent third parties. Italy is now trying to keep its people inside — inside their own country and inside their own homes.

No one knows how long this crisis will run, but the highly contagious nature of the virus and the fact it is already in so many countries suggests it will be with us for a while yet. The West will need to do much better than this.