9 December 2021. Pandemic | Politics
Trying to understand the pandemic through some of the recent books about it | Visualising tyranny, literally.
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#1: Trying to understand the pandemic through some of the recent books about it
The LRB has a long review article by John Lanchester on a recent selection of books on the pandemic which may be available behind its relatively tightly metered paywall, depending on how often you visit their site.
Lanchester, best known as a novelist, is good at writing this big picture stuff, as he has demonstrated repeatedly since the financial crisis. The piece reviews five books on the pandemic, representing a range of titles in what mnust now be a crowded market: Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic; Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy; Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus; Covid by Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data; The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality. That crucial second line of the thinking person’s non-fiction title gets more freighted by the year.
It’s a long article—something like 6,000 words—so I’m just going to capture some standout points here.
You never know you are with the pandemic.
Every one of the books I’ve read is situated in a moment in time, and in every case, whether it was the second wave and the Alpha variant, or the third wave and the Delta variant, the disease came up with a new narrative, a new set of unpleasant surprises. Countries, indeed entire continents, which were praised for their successful response would, months or sometimes just weeks later, become epicentres of fresh disaster... I would like to think that the surprises are over, and that we are closer to the end of this than to the beginning. I would like to be confident that the majority of all the people killed by Covid have already died. Unfortunately, we can’t count on either proposition.
Disease is a central fact of human history, but in the rich world we’ve lost touch with this fact.
Lanchester observes that ‘germs’ is one of the three world-shaping elements in the title of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel and that it was the viruses that Cortes took to Mexico that did for the Aztec empire. Until the 19th century, it was also a central fact of urban life. But:
The weird world – Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – has responded poorly to Covid, and part of the reason is that the weird world had been existing at a distance from this central reality of human history. As Adam Tooze points out in his brilliant book Shutdown, 91 per cent of deaths in the contemporary West are from noncommunicable diseases like cancers and strokes and heart attacks, many of them illnesses associated with modern lifestyles. The equivalent figure in sub-Saharan Africa is 34 per cent. We have a generation of leaders in the West who have no visceral understanding of the risks posed by infectious illness.
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(Pandemic painting in Tournai, Belgium. Photograph by Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer). CC BY 4.0)
The UK was a COVID disaster waiting to happen
This is mostly down to the economic and health effects of policies that have increased inequality over the last forty years. Lanchester has one of the tersest summaries of the UK that you’ll see:
(T)he UK is crowded, old, fat, cramped, unequal and much visited, and all of those things increase the impact of Covid.
In theory, all the same it should have responded better to the pandemic. It had been monitoring pandemics on the National Risk Register, and it had a response plan. But the plan needed a decent health and social care system to work, rather than one that had been systematically underfunded:
(T)he NHS had a chronic shortage of the necessary equipment and a plan that was reliant on exactly the kind of ‘just in time’ supply methods most likely to be affected by a pandemic. Personal protective equipment that had passed its sell-by date during the austerity years simply had stickers with new sell-by dates stuck on top of the old ones... Austerity had hollowed out the system’s preparedness. Germany had 33.8 intensive care beds for every hundred thousand members of the population; Spain had 9.7; the UK had 7.3.
There’s much more in here, for those interested, in the specific failures of the British politic system in general and the British government in particular, but it can be summarised in a phrase: “wishful thinking.”
The class impact of the pandemic is startling, no matter how many times you look at the numbers
At one point Lanchester shorthands the pandemic like this (not his phrase): “middle class hiding while working-class people bring them things.” The book on pandemic data by Spiegelhalter and Masters spells out the effects of this.
(W)e learn that three of the jobs with the highest UK levels of Covid mortality were chefs, cab drivers and bus drivers. No surprises there. The less well-off people are, the less likely they are to work from home; the more likely they are to have to work in jobs involving close contact with other people and to live in crowded housing. This feeds into shocking ethnic disparities in outcomes: in the first wave, the Covid death rate for women of Black African ethnicity in the UK was three times higher than for the white population, and four times higher for men.
Until everyone’s vaccinated, no-one’s safe
One of the surprising elements globally of the pandemic was that places like sub-Saharan Africa were’t worse-affected than they were. Partly this is down to their much younger populations: the risk of dying from Covid doubles with every six years of age. So the 23 year median age gap between southern Africa and Europe means an average European is 16 times more likely to die of COVID-19.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea not to fund the vaccination of this. In Shutdown, Tooze puts some numbers on this:
In May 2020, the estimated cost of vaccinating the entire planet was $25 billion. That’s a lot of money. On the other hand, $20.2 billion is what the US military spent on air-conditioning each year in Afghanistan and Iraq. It might turn out to have been a very stupid $25 billion for the rich world to have saved. Covid is still here (and) 44 per cent of the world’s population is unvaccinated.
My futures-led analysis of ‘The Long Pandemic’ on the wider effects of the pandemic is online at the SOIF website and can be downloaded here.
#2: Visualising tyranny. Literally.
((C) Nora Krug. From Chapter 10, “Believe in Truth”)
As the odds shorten on whether America will succeed in keeping its democracy, Timothy Snyder’s short book ‘On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century’ has mutated from being a warning to being a monitoring device.
Snyder is an historian who is best known for his work on mid-20th century European history, and Tyranny drew on that work.
Now, as the New Yorker reports, an illustrated version of the book has been published, with images by Nora Krug. Krug herself is German-American, and she’s certainly not a stranger. One of her books is the graphic novel Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home, and in her illustrations for Snyder’s book, she uses collage effects and visual styles that are designed to emphasise the universality of the subject matter.
Here’s another image from the new edition, courtesy of The New Yorker.
((C) Nora Krug. From Chapter 11, “Investigate”.)
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