There is no precedent for the COVID-19 crisis, not because of the lethality of the virus, but because of the measures that the majority of the nations have taken to face it. In terms of mortality and transmission rates, the world has suffered worse pandemics. However, in terms of scale and impact, the fact that national governments, across all continents have decided to put one third of the world’s population [1] under quarantine is an unprecedented move.

As soon as the virus started spreading throughout Europe and the rest of the world, the dilemma was whether to sacrifice the national economy on behalf of people’s health. At first, even when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, there was not a unified response to contain it.

Even among the G-7, the lack of coordination was disorienting. Among the European countries the division was embarrassing, especially within the European Union Schengen zone. The COVID-19  crisis is uncovering the fact that the EU is just an unprincipled union where national fears can fuel disordered decisions and create strategic disasters. As soon as the economic interests of every country was at stake, there was no consensus, nor solidarity among EU members on how to handle the outbreak.

Nevertheless, by prioritizing national-interest and abandoning the logic of a collective response, the virus spread rapidly at alarming levels and, governments ended up succumbing to the hard lockdown and quarantine measures that they were so hesitant to take in the first place. Now we have an enormous number of infected people and deaths, in addition to health systems becoming totally overwhelmed and the socio-economic consequences of the response creating a systemic disaster.

The health system in Italy was so overwhelmed that it reached a level where crisis measures were drafted to potentially deny treatment to patients over 80 because of the lack of beds, ventilators and medical resources.[2] Belgium, afraid of reaching that level of saturation, declared they were not taking any longer COVID-19 patients coming from other European countries.[3] Solidarity with the Spanish and the Italian situation has been almost non-existent coming from the rest of the EU. The only country who gave Italy any help was Germany which accepted to treat dozens of Italian COVID-19 patients on German soil[4].

Because of decisions driven by fear and national-interest, while not even saving their economies, the EU rapidly became the epicenter of the virus after China. Countries like Italy, Spain, the UK and France surpassed the 100,000 cases by having more than 5,000 infected and more than 500 deaths per day.

One month later, Italy, is seeing the curve of infections flattening, as well as some other countries in Europe that were not hit as strongly, such as Denmark and Austria. Now is that the countries that are seeing their caseload falling are facing the same dilemma as they did at the start of the outbreak: open up or further containment?

Lockdowns are what Paul Watzlawick defines as “an ultra-solution”: an attempt to fix a problem by getting rid of it and everything that goes with it.[5] Falling into this trap, governments are at risk of destroying both the economy and people’s lives.

In France, people are already starting to react to the inconsistency of the political response – saying that the government has not considered the impact on those that are self-employed and businesses – by crying loud and strong : “Give us masks and let us go out!”

For instance, Vinci, Toyota and Renault have already asked their employees to return to work. In the same vein, the tourist sector in France is calling upon French nationals to start making reservations at their establishments. Libraries and hair saloons are asking for exceptions and petitions to work under special conditions. On the street below my house in Paris there is a shop that fixes bikes, scooters and motorcycles and it is working in the middle of the road. Meanwhile, children are playing football outside. Many other states in Europe have already begun to ease restrictions on movement and businesses.[6]  

However, without lockdown measures, the only way to effectively contain the massive spread of the virus requires millions of tests each week, two billions masks per week, and competent tracking mechanisms; a measure that, in reality, European governments cannot implement because they do not have the resources to do it. Thus, if they proceed with the ongoing easing of the lockdown restrictive measures, they are risking a second outbreak of the virus.

In Europe there are still thousands of people getting infected and hundreds dying per day. It is irrational that for far fewer numbers they decided to lockdown countries, and now with such figures (even if they are decreasing) they are pretending that the threat has been contained.

The worst-case scenario would be to go through this long period of confinement, end it prematurely and lose the positive effects reached so far due to lack of sufficient treatments and immunization. It is the ultra-solution trap, the political decision makers would lose on both counts: governments will be forced to impose another period of confinement in the middle of the summer, leading to the rise of social-political tensions driven by both the impoverishment that followed the first wave of covid-19 and the distrust in the governments to handle the second wave.

Are there ways out of this ultra-solution trap?

The political price of the “Stop and Go” approach, meaning alternating periods of lockdown and near-normal operations according to what the situation dictates, will certainly be paid by the current governments. Eventually, implementing a global covid-19 response coordinated between nations could lead the way out of this crisis. However, this will only happen if national interests are subordinated to concerns over people’s health. Making this change would require that governments are led by transformational leaders.

For the time being, it is clear that our politicians are crying out “It’s the economy, stupid.” That does not promise transformation, I call it “panic”.

Further reading: IARAN four scenarios and four steps to guide humanitarian actors in the covid-19 complexity and to enhance their responses.

For the Spanish version of the article press here

NOTES

[1] Juliana Kaplan, Lauren Frias and Morgan McFall-Johnsen (2020) A third of the global population is on coronavirus lockdown — here's our constantly updated list of countries locking down and opening up.

[2] Erica Di Blasi (2020) Italians over 80 'will be left to die' as country overwhelmed by coronavirus.

[3] NWS (2020) Belgium’s hospitals won’t be taking in COVID-19 from abroad for the time being.

[4] Jessica Bateman (2020) ‘Solidarity knows no borders’: Germany treating dozens of coronavirus patients from Italy and France.

[5] Watzlawick, P. (1988). Ultra-solutions: How to fail most successfully. W W Norton & Co.

[6] The Guardian (2020) Austria reopens small shops and parks as coronavirus lockdown is relaxed. And Jeroen Kraaijenbrink (2020) The Dutch Answer To COVID-19: The ‘1.5 Meter Economy’