The Economist published a lead article on Britain and Covid19. By and large, the piece attempts to be an indictment of Boris Johnson’s leadership. For The Economist, England had “the wrong kind of prime minister”: “Mr Johnson got the top job because he is a brilliant campaigner and a charismatic entertainer with whom the Conservative Party fell in love”. The main criticism of Johnson is that he did not lock the country down earlier, therefore going in the direction some scientists (in particular, Professor Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College) thought was best.
Yet perhaps Johnson should be held accountable for lack of other measures that did not include a lockdown. For example, for a long time, people entering in England weren’t tested but just asked to go through self-quarantine. The idea that locking England down a week earlier would have spared it half of its casualties is certainly a powerful criticism. Perhaps Professor Ferguson is right, but his views should be taken with more than a grain of salt.
The piece has however some interesting considerations, worth sharing and pondering.
1) Centralization and decentralization
In the pandemic, centralization of decision-making was widely praised and many people considered, for example, the “divided governance” of the emergency, between Washington and state government, as an additional risk factor. The Economist on the other hand points out that: “the government has wasted the most precious commodity in a crisis: time. In a federal system, like America’s, the central government’s failings can be mitigated by state and local authorities. In a centralised system, they cannot.” So, perhaps federal, decentralized systems are not necessarily performing worse in the emergency than centralized ones. Switzerland and Germany (a most successful state in coping with Covid19) are federal systems too.
2) The NHS
The NHS was not “overwhelmed” and went through “a swift reorganization” to cope with increased demand. I wonder how this happened and if perhaps it is an assessment that could be generalized: that is if hospital networks actually performed better than expected also in other countries and instead what failed was “public health”, i.e. the complex set of measures that were put in place to combat the epidemic.
3) PPE
The Economist argues that:
Delays in fixing ppe supply chains, promoting face coverings and increasing testing capacity were clearly errors at the time. Despite the urging of the country’s scientists and the World Health Organisation, by the middle of April Britain was still carrying out just 12,000 tests a day, compared with 44,000 in Italy and 51,000 in Germany. Because most testing was reserved for hospitals, care homes struggled to find out which of their residents and staff were infected. Competition for ppe was fierce, so they also struggled to get the kit they needed to protect their workers. The government is not solely to blame. The pandemic made new demands on the system. Some crucial bits of machinery did not work. The publicly owned company which supplies the health service with ppe failed. Public Health England, which was responsible for testing and tracing, failed.
This complements the strong criticism of Public Health for being “horrendously bureaucratic” on the Daily Telegraph. Matt Ridley soberly explained that “The decisions by Public Health England not to go out to the market for testing, protective equipment and logistics, to cease testing almost completely in March and to send people to care homes from hospitals affected by the virus – these were just bureaucratic bone-headedness”.
The Economist faults the government for not mobilizing the private sector strongly enough for testing (a point also raised by Terence Kealey) and points out that failures in the supply of PPE were actually due to public procurement mistakes (just google PPE Covid UK and a list of disasters will appear on your screen).
It will take time, I think, to assess what went well and what went wrong with Covid19 – and it will take a better understanding of the virus and the illness it creates. Yet I think the idea that “you need bigger governments to cope with the pandemic” will look more and more like an oversimplication. Indeed, it is almost certain to look like a very expensive oversimplification, as it will be used as an excuse to increase government budgets substantially.
READER COMMENTS
Shane L
Jun 27 2020 at 6:49am
Well I don’t think size of government need come into the picture at all. Ireland has a government probably the same or smaller in size to the UK, but the Irish government acted more swiftly in the early stages of the outbreak, when the British government still seemed to be hoping for herd immunity.
On March 9th, the Irish government announced the cancellation of all St Patrick’s Day (17th March) parades for 2020. By contrast, the UK continued to proceed with its Cheltenham horse racing festival (March 10th) and a Champions League football match (March 11th), each featuring enormous numbers of people pressed together in party atmosphere, including thousands of Spanish football fans in the latter case, despite Spain’s considerable outbreak. BBC has a good article on this, describing recent scholarship that found major Covid-19 outbreaks in each location following these sporting events. An Irish journalist who attended Cheltenham was stunned by the comparison between cautious Ireland and reckless UK:
As of June 27th 2020, Our World in Data show the resulting deaths per capita in each country as follows:
Ireland: 350.4 per million
UK: 639.5 per million
There’s a general sense of support here in Ireland for the government’s response, and I gather from British friends that there is some confusion and exasperation with the government there. (Here is a survey showing that 87% of Irish and only 58% of British respondents think their governments are responding well to the crisis.)
I wouldn’t take any broad interpretation about size of government from this. I’m sure there are complex additional reasons to do with demographics, culture and economy that I haven’t mentioned. But, broadly speaking, it seems the Irish government was more competent than the British government during this crisis. Boris Johnson may be fun and provocative, but may not be a particularly competent national leader. Ireland’s prime minister during the crisis, Leo Varadkar, had been a medical doctor before entering politics, so may have been more knowledgeable about the dangers of a pandemic.
Robert Schadler
Jun 28 2020 at 1:53pm
Good discussion.
Think Frank Knight’s distinction between “risk” and “uncertainty” has much to offer here. Risk: there is enough past experience so that it can be reasonably projected into the future, and thus, insurance companies can issue policies to cover it.
Uncertainty is when there is no such base of data. We’re flying blind.
He focused on business and the entrepreneur; His analysis was that most entrepreneurs fail, but those who get something right — often by luck — are well rewarded.
Apply this to the governments various responses to this NOVEL virus. No political leaders or heads of bureaucracies had enough knowledge to “do the right thing” but they all felt propelled “to do something.” Getting something right or wrong was more a matter of luck than rational judgment. AND, we still have no idea, when this virus is “over” which policy will turn out to be the best one over 2-5 years. We simply do not know, if the best experts.
One might also expand this to ask: given the uncertainty, how well are modern governments structured to deal with crises largely beyond “risk”? They will tilt toward wanting to project the perception that they know what they are doing and saying. And some portion of what they say and do will be, more or less, “right”.
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