The Case for Democracy in the COVID-19 Pandemic. David Seedhouse, Dr.
about them, or the probable zoonotic cause of the pandemic (9), or the next one. ‘Experts’ regularly make contradictory predictions based on guesswork and unproven assumptions. Charts and statistics are presented in the news media as if they require no interpretation, and with little or no context. Basic civil liberties have been pushed aside without parliamentary approval and with no public debate. Churches and other places of worship are closed. Attendance at funerals is strictly limited – to ‘close family members’ in the UK at present (May 30th), and people are forbidden to hug each other, which is unbelievably cruel. Schools and universities, which should be bastions of critical thinking, were closed throughout April and May, despite (disputed) evidence that such closures have little effect. Countless thousands of people are supermarket shopping wearing facemasks and gloves, backing off as fellow human-beings approach.
Every day we get a head count of ‘new cases’ and graphs of ‘cumulative deaths', almost always with dramatic, scary imagery of police, doctors and nurses in hazmat suits, ambulances, emergency vehicles and sick people on stretchers. As public health Professor Allyson Pollock observed, ‘…it is a great pity that the government uses the death counts and the testing counts as a propaganda tool. … These data are unreliable when they are reported daily, and inaccurate…’ (10).
Wartime metaphors are everywhere in the UK: ‘frontline staff', ‘save our NHS', ‘your NHS needs you', ‘the NHS is rallying the troops for the war on coronavirus', ‘the invisible enemy'. NHS staff are forbidden to speak out: careless talk costs lives, your country needs you, stay at home for victory (11).
There is still (May 28th) hardly a focus on anything else. There is so much that could and should be reported on the front pages that is being ignored, or at least receives much less attention than the course of the virus: comparative death rates with the ‘flu; comparative death rates from other diseases where mortality is much higher, and is always much higher, year on year; chronic underfunding of health services; the effect on people's mental health; the effects of incarcerating and terrifying children; the funding of the news-media itself; the behaviour of large corporates which have brazenly jumped on the propaganda bandwagon to push their products. There's an endless list of topics at least as important as the pandemic, yet for weeks we have heard of little else.
Every major decision and every policy have been based on hypothetical models, not scientific truths. Different models present different scenarios. Most governments have assumed the worst, when the evidence from every country is that ‘the worst’ is not happening. No-one really knows what's going on, but it is at least clear that dire predictions of spiralling ‘exponential’ contagion have not happened. And they have not happened whether the country is Spain or Sweden, where quite different strategies have been used: complete lockdown in the former and personal choice to try to avoid infection in the other.
Were journalists to be calm, were they to report figures soberly, accurately and comparatively, were they to cast doubt on the claims of policy-makers and decision-makers, they would be providing a public service, offering balance and allowing people to think: if 800,000 suicides are not an emergency why are 370,000 deaths associated with, but not provably caused by, COVID-19 an ‘unprecedented crisis'?
As my research has progressed, I have increasingly focused on the psychology of the episode. It has seemed the only way to get a foothold. It does not provide all the answers, but it does explain some of the uneven human reaction. When this is placed alongside careful consideration of the narrow-minded behaviour of some scientists and public health officials, the striking lack of ethical reflection all round, and the continuing lack of access to proper democratic channels for ordinary citizens, this series of unfortunate events becomes just a little more explicable, though the reasons why so much has become so unbalanced so quickly remains a mystery to me.
The emergence of a novel coronavirus is not the fault of government and its advisers. It is popularly assumed that the virus originated in bats, but like almost everything else in the pandemic no-one knows for sure (12). But however it came to infect humans – even if as seems likely it was from our relentless abuse of animals – no scientist, politician or policy-maker can be blamed for it directly. Nevertheless, there are profoundly serious questions our leaders do need to answer.
What started out as a need to understand extraordinary events has slowly become something else. The more I have begun to understand, the more I have found myself asking personal questions. The most important of which was, and is: do I want to live like this?
My answer, increasingly, day by day, has been: no. I don't want to live in a society where I have no meaningful say in what happens to me. I don't want to be locked down and prevented from seeing my daughters in New Zealand indefinitely. I don't want to be governed by a political elite with values I don't share. I don't want to live in a society where the only view of health is that it is the opposite of disease, as a presumed fact. I don't want to live in a society where people's view of risk can be so easily distorted by propaganda that they are scared to death of something that is unlikely to hurt them. I don't want to live in a society where the politician I helped elect to represent my views can vote for exactly the opposite in parliament. Nor do I want to live in a society obsessed with living at any cost.
I want to live in a society where people are encouraged and supported to think for themselves. Where journalists see their work as not merely to report, or comment, but to educate and encourage reflection, rather than an instant emotional reaction. I want to live in a society where I can encourage others to grow. I want to live in a society where I can contribute and where there are ways where my views can count and can have an impact. I want to live in a society where quality of life is more important than clinging to the perch whatever the price. And I want to live in a society where there is real democracy, rather than the sham we are continually persuaded is the least-worst option (13).
What started out as a need to make sense of other people's decisions has slowly turned into a protest.
There you have it. This book is a protest. It is a reasoned, researched, calm and measured protest, but a protest it most certainly is. It's a call to action too. If you agree with only a fraction of my case for democracy, please join me and others, help us to massively expand our decision-making processes and involvement, and create a world where everyone, no matter what their circumstances or social standing, can have a meaningful say in what we do to it and to each other.
2 Searching for Balance
Many human beings – certainly very many millions – have been infected with a potentially fatal novel coronavirus which can cause a disease known as COVID-19. Governments around the world have restricted civil liberties to halt or slow its spread. Policy-makers claim to be ‘guided by the science’ and most insist that their measures – which in some countries have included laws to force people not to leave their homes for any reason for weeks – are ‘essential to the public health'.
While this reaction is understandable up to a point, there are so many unknowns and so many diverse social, economic and psychological factors in play, it is equally essential to ask whether such a radical response is proportionate: now and in the future.
The Spanish ‘flu of 1918 is estimated to have killed between 50 and 100 million people and has informed responses to influenza and other viral outbreaks ever since. There is genuine fear among academics and public health specialists that an outbreak on a similar scale could occur, which in part explains the extreme curtailment of liberty in 2020. Yet, COVID-19 is far less damaging than the Spanish ‘flu (although it is more damaging than other recent viruses):
Most people recover from Covid-19 within a week and cannot even be certain they had it, as they probably won't be tested. The advice is to stay home, rest and take paracetamol. In 80% of cases, that is the end of it. But NHS advice is that if the symptoms – mainly the dry cough, temperature and fatigue – have not gone by the end of a week, or they get worse, people should seek medical help. (14)
The impacted populations are not the same in these pandemics. COVID-19 almost entirely affects the elderly, whereas Spanish ‘flu affected the 20–40 age group (15).
Regardless of their virulence, epidemics cause considerable alarm among planners.