Few social problems have generated as much information and indicators as the Covid-19 pandemic and its management. Despite this, it is not easy to provide definitive evidence on the successes or failures of policies adopted to control or reduce their consequences.
First, because the pandemic is not yet over and its different waves show that in some countries, apparently “successful”, the results ended up being short-lived when a new variant of the virus made them recede in the rankings that explain the vicissitudes of this health war. And secondly, because certain geographic, demographic, cultural and even ethnic factors could explain comparatively greater successes, without the result necessarily depending, or mainly, on the action of governments.
It’s been a year and a half since the pandemic started. The global and systemic crisis that it unleashed compromised the management capacity of governments around the world. To a greater or lesser degree, all adopted four types of policies: population isolation and closure of activities; disease detection, monitoring and care, including testing and vaccination campaigns; partial compensation for the negative effects produced by the cessation of activities; and public communication, with the objective of informing, preventing and convincing the population about the necessary or desirable behaviors in the face of an emergency.
To achieve these goals, governments developed several action strategies and put into practice all the resources at their disposal to contain the spread of the disease, care for and rehabilitate the sick, minimize the number of deaths and reduce the undesirable effects of the adopted policies.
Statistics eloquently demonstrate that the results achieved in each country were very different, as well as the intensity or timing of the policies adopted. The degree of isolation and confinement of the population not only shows differences between countries, but the rigor of the measurements varied successively according to the phases, outbreaks and new strains of the coronavirus.
Screening for possible infections, the number of tests performed, the case fatality rate and the vaccination rate also differ greatly from country to country. In some countries, state intervention in the rescue of closed companies or families and workers without income was extensive and generous, in others it was non-existent. Some governments organized intensive communication and outreach campaigns, while others did so without them.
In part, the different strategies chosen depend on the particular circumstances in which the pandemic took countries by surprise. Although the health crisis everywhere required the diversion of budgetary resources to cover the direct and indirect costs of the emergency, the starting conditions in each country were very different.
Factors such as the size of the fiscal deficit, the level and distribution of income, foreign exchange reserves, unemployment and informal labor rates, and the degree of dependence of marginal sectors on unconditional state transfers vary from country to country.
The availability of infrastructure and logistical capacity in each country also played an important role, especially in terms of health, transport and communications.
Other differential factors such as size, population and insularity may have had some influence on the results that each country has achieved in its fight against the virus. And we could even add other distinguishing factors, such as international alignments, the timing of the pre-election process, prevailing cultural values or the degree of democratization and trust in authorities.
This enumeration, far from being exhaustive, brings us at least closer to being able to isolate and attribute to the relative institutional capacity of countries and their governments a part of the explanation for the different results achieved so far in this singular pandemic war. What remains?
Perhaps the most relevant institutional capacity, in such a complex and intricate scenario, was to exercise strategic leadership, that is, to provide the necessary leadership and inspiration to generate and implement a shared vision, a mission where society as a whole it reflects a collective will to achieve a common goal.
But this also implied other capabilities, which had to be institutionalized in advance and could not be improvised in the midst of a crisis. For example, planning, scheduling, negotiating, coordinating, monitoring and controlling. Or those of innovating, communicating and convincing, subordinating political speculations.
I am not sure whether considering the above set of factors would help to explain, on a case-by-case basis, the varied results that countries and their governments have achieved to contain the pandemic and its consequences. Future diagnoses will likely provide better answers.
There still remains, on the other hand, a wide field of counterfactual speculations that the academy, the press and political oppositions present almost every day. What would have happened if quarantines and confinements had been less prolonged, reducing the serious negative economic consequences of the immobilization of productive activity?
Had selective school closures been arranged earlier, avoiding the pedagogical and social costs imposed on an entire generation of students? If, instead of adopting demagogic and supposedly reassuring behavior, how could publicly deny the threat of the virus, some political leaders had shown more responsible attitudes? Or if the international community had played a more active role in preventing inequalities between countries and social classes, exacerbated by the pandemic?
We could go on imagining other possible scenarios, but counterfactual reasoning will have to be weighed against the evidence produced by case studies in future research on this exciting topic.
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