COVID-19: How have democracies handled the lockdown?
COVID-19: How have democracies handled the lockdown?
WRITTEN BY DHARISH DAVID AND CHEW SI XING THERESA
23 April 2020
While there is growing evidence that detection and early response of a viral outbreak could be delayed in autocracies, they could be very swift and effective in stopping its spread and mitigating its effects. Democracies were considered no match to the scale and speed of China’s response to COVID-19, which was initially lauded by the WHO and many world leaders as very effective in containing the viral outbreak. Though there was a delay in detection, early response and letting the world know about the virus, once the crisis got out of hand Beijing implemented draconian measures very quickly since the 23 January 2020. Measures included quarantining entire cities in a matter of days, suspending travel, closing schools and businesses, and enforcing a lockdown at the provincial level. But it is becoming more evident that Beijing also went beyond by manipulating data, including under-reporting coronavirus infections and deaths.
This is in line with the authoritarian playbook, where regimes can cover-up and control the narrative, put in place heavy-handed measures without much accountability or protection and upholding of individual rights. However, democracies are always performing a balancing act between effectively using state authority for public interest and providing for civil liberties. So how have democracies performed in containment after the pandemic spread to the rest of the world?
With COVID-19 deaths nearing their peaks, one after another in many Western democracies, criticisms are mounting on how President Trump and Boris Johnson handled the crisis. Both their inabilities in handling the pandemic, from initial denial, to negligence, to ineptitude, and then rather slow and incremental response has made it look like democratic regimes with transparent governance, open information and liberal freedoms are incapable of containing such a crisis effectively. Have democracies in general responded worse by not implementing stringent measures to control the spread of the virus and saving lives in comparison to their autocratic counterparts?
New data shows that democracies have been implementing more stringent policies than autocracies
Since the end of January this year, infections and fatalities have been rising rapidly across the globe in spite of consistent attempts by many governments to flatten the curve in order to reduce the pressure on public health systems. This led to an overwhelming number of countries including democracies to announce policies such as social distancing to more extreme measures such as national lockdowns.
A pandemic of such scale does require urgent actions, though this is not something normally associated with deliberative and democratic policymaking. However it is becoming more evident that democracies can act with one resolve and implement lockdowns when required, temporarily limiting individual rights for the sake of public interest. The notorious and earliest ones were implemented in Italy and Spain when the crisis was getting out of hand there, and in countries like New Zealand, India, Serbia, Costa Rica, Denmark and others where national lockdowns were implemented to prevent a peak.
Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan have managed well, while Singapore and Taiwan have kept the disease almost entirely under control, at least for now. Many of these countries were better prepared owing to their experiences with SARS, H1N1 and MERS.
While it is true that democracies do find it harder to make the really tough choices compared to autocracies, democracies’ ability to adapt has shown how democratic states are able to play catch-up. To prove that democracies were no slouch at dealing with the pandemic. Many states went the extra mile like authorizing special constitutional powers and declaring a state of emergency as seen in New Zealand, Japan and others but what remains consistent in democracies, despite granting the government more power is the state’s accountability to its people.
To better understand measures implemented in countries, the coronavirus government response tracker hosted by the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (OxCGF) tracks the wide range of measures in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, including school and workplace closures to fiscal and monetary policies. It is important to note that this index is still being updated and it only records the number and strictness of government policies, and therefore cannot be interpreted as effectiveness of a country’s response. Therefore, a country with a higher score on the Stringency Index only means more stringent policies were implemented and does not provide any assessment of how the country contained the spread or fatalities of the virus.
We plotted the stringency scores from OxCGF index and their democratic performance scores as measured using EIU Democracy Index for 2018. Till mid-March China remained the most stringent implementer of containment policies, but surprisingly by early April more democratic countries did not shy away from doing so as well. The chart below provides a better picture of the wide spectrum of stringent policies taken by countries across the governance spectrum, in fact the line tilts slightly towards democrative states having taken more stringent measures to contain the crisis.
But in reality it is interesting to see that while autocracies have in general taken quite stringent measures in response to the crisis, democracies have been both flexible and aggressive. For example countries such as New Zealand, Costa Rica, Serbia and India took more bold measures compared to a more temperate approach taken by countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and Sweden. We turn our attention to these selected countries to look at the similarities between these two groups of outliers.
Democracies that quickly escalated lockdown policies to take no risk
In spite of New Zealand’s initial low number of cases, Prime Minister Ardern declared a state of emergency with escalation in physical distancing and travel restrictions and eventually enforced a national lockdown on 26 March 2020. New Zealand’s use of an elimination strategy was to effectively extinguish chains of viral transmission. As a result, new infections have dwindled to the lowest in weeks and the death toll stood at its lowest count of 11 as of 17 April 2020.
India chose to implement aggressive preventive measures to manage and contain the crisis to keep cases below 10,000 so far, which is a much lower rate than than the global incidence rate. Such measures were imperative as India is more prone to the spread due to its large vulnerable population and in order to prevent further stress on its public healthcare system. Prime Minister Modi announced the world’s biggest lockdown on 24 March 2020 which has been extended till 3 May. In order to ensure citizens’ compliance, relevant provisions were executed using Indian Penal Code (IPC) with punishments including imprisonment and fines. As at 17 April 2020, containment of the virus has helped the growth factor of cases to decline by 40%.
Serbia under President Vucic has implemented some of the toughest restrictions in Europe. Legal measures included a Decree on employers during the State of Emergency to work from home and by 18 March 2020, other measures included self-isolation and curfews where violators were punishable by law. As of 18 April 2020, there has been a decreasing trend of the growth factor which suggests effective containment so far.
Costa Rica had adopted even more aggressive policies than some autocratic states but remained within constitutional limits by issuing Execute decrees for companies to shift to work from home immediately after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 on 6 March 2020. Even before even hitting its 100th case mark, its national borders, schools, and non-essential businesses were closed on 18 March.
Divergent responses suggest many democracies did not choose stringent measures
On the other end of the spectrum there are democracies such as Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Sweden that have been more unrestrained in their approach and instead used knowledge and informed decisions to manage the impact but have also faced their own criticism.
South Korea took measures that were in stark contrast to countries like China and Italy, where emphasis was on transparency and public cooperation. Relevant laws enacted included the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act (IDCPA) which endows the government with highly specific means to distribute resources and mobilize and stimulate various sectors to fight against the outbreak. Use of technological resources like text alerts and smartphone apps to share information about testing or perform contact tracing helped the state to tide through the more recent surge in infections.
Taiwan had implemented almost 100 proactive and targeted initiatives mostly from the national government such as screening Wuhan flights since as early as 31 December 2019, to eventual barring of Chinese arrivals on 6 February 2020. Instead of national lockdown, Taiwan used international travel records, digital health-insurance to trace potential infected individuals and fining quarantine violators with the support of Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Act. Taiwan has managed to slow down the number of cases by 14 April 2020, it had no new reported cases the first time in over a month.
To prevent fatigue that would follow from a full lockdown, Singapore engaged its people with less bellicose efforts like ensuring social distancing, public awareness campaigns on hygiene but eventually a “circuit breaker” had to be put in place from 7 April after the surge in imported cases and local spread which came with a swift passing of a new law known as the COVID-19 (Temporary Measures) Regulations 2020. The numbers of infected only recently soared in worker dormitories, but local coronavirus cases in the community have remained stable throughout.
Japan’s coronavirus response has been puzzling, with no extreme measures implemented and limited testing and little interest in enforcing social distancing. Abe’s government has been criticized for not letting the people understand the severity of the virus but by 16 April, the government declared a nationwide state of emergency as the cases were increasing more rapidly.
In Sweden, the parliament passed a new law that gave the government temporary extra powers to bypass parliament if there was a need to adopt emergency measures. However, elementary schools and most businesses are still open. Individuals, however are still free to choose how they respond to the crisis, though social distancing has been encouraged but not enforced. By mid-April Sweden’s cases were starting to show signs of decline and its health system has not had any difficulties in managing the rapid upswing in patients
What then explains success in containing the pandemic, and does stringency matter at all?
It is quite clear by now that there is a large variation in government responses to the crisis, but the real question is whether more stringent measures have an effect on containing infection and fatality rates.
As we might expect, data suggests that countries implemented more stringent policies over time to control the spread of the outbreak, but some governments were quicker in enforcing measures, while in other countries there were lags in the stringency of responses. Countries like South Korea, that were ahead of the curve as the charts by OxCGRT suggest, were implementing stringent policies ahead of the infections to prevent the spread, rather than adopting a reactionary approach after the numbers soared. But so far the data suggests that more countries ended up taking a reactionary approach in implementing more stringent policies only after there was a rise in infection and fatality rates.
Though the OxCGRT data and study uses simplistic indicators and metrics more data will eventually help us understand what type of measures are necessary and their effectiveness. However, this also depends on how the pandemic will play out, as it has not peaked in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the possibility of a second wave in many countries that have seen their numbers peak. At the end of the day, does being more prepared and implementing preventive measures equipped with scientific facts matter more than governance structures and stringent responses?
As we have seen with this outbreak, many full and flawed democracies in line with EIU definitions, many which are considered technocratic, have been quite successful with open and transparent information, with an independent media, unlike autocratic states. Flawed democracies do have the necessary civil rights and the public’s trust in government, thus when there are policies put in place that curtail individual rights, citizens are able to adapt rather quickly.
These countries include but are not limited to Asia's advanced technocratic democracies which were previously known as the “Asian Tigers” which have been more effective in containing the crisis, unlike in the West where the virus has exposed creaks in public services and political landscape. Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan have managed well, while Singapore and Taiwan have kept the disease almost entirely under control, at least for now. Moreover, many of these countries were better prepared with their experience in the past with such communicable disease outbreaks, including Taiwan’s experience with influenza H1N1, Hong Kong and Singapore’s experience with SARS, and South Korea’s with MERS. from the initial days of the outbreak, they have anticipated the need for a possible lockdown and surveillance that is required for early detection, testing, isolation and treatment.
Is it still too early to declare victory for democracies?
Though autocratic states’ have their influential admirers, it is in their DNA to take up harsh and aggressive measures, restrict the flow of information and persecute perceived critics in order to contain a crisis to save face and maintain political legitimacy. The presence of widespread fear and mistrust are indeed the greatest barriers in overcoming a pandemic since no regime can stop new outbreaks. Instead of taking absolute control, there is a need for democratic values, a system of transparency and information-sharing, sustaining public trust with collaboration between the various stakeholders that can eventually contain a pandemic.
It may seem surprising that despite their tedious bottom-up processes, democracies outperform their authoritarian counterparts on this measure. In the event of an disease outbreak such as COVID-19, the existence of a constructive feedback mechanism can actually help guide a more dynamic response from the government. Democracies may not get everything right, but they do try. Though there is still a lot to learn from this pandemic as it fully plays out, but for now it seems that a ‘prevention is better than cure’ approach, by being more prepared and implementing preventive measures seems to have worked better in containment.
It is clear from the examples outlined that democracies have the flexibility to tailor their policies as there is no one size fits all, but that in no way restricts them from implementing the most stringent policies when required even when that means the temporary suspension of liberal rights. The range of stringent measures has reflected well on democracy’s flexibility and adaptability to change course when necessary regardless of which path was taken and to deal with criticism constructively regardless.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dharish David (PhD) is an associate faculty for the University of London at the Singapore Institute of Management – Global Education (SIM-GE), teaching courses relating to political economy.
Chew Si Xing Theresa is an Undergraduate Student in Economics & Politics at the University of London, Singapore Institute of Management – Global Education (SIM-GE). Image credit: CC BY-NC 4.0/Republic of Korea/Flickr.