Once around the sun

It’s time to account for the year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In the time it’s taken our planet to orbit once around its nearest star, there have been 119.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 2.6 million deaths, reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). It is a global catastrophe by any measure. Since the last such comparable pandemic in the early 20th century, science and technology have progressed to such an extent that every new development has been instantly transmitted around the world, reported, analyzed, assessed and acted on, and yet scientists, public health experts and ordinary people struggled to understand the full extent of its influence and power.

People have become used to seeing the devastating effects of massive conflicts and natural disasters around the world but they still weren’t prepared for the way this virus would threaten everyone in the course of normal social interaction. It is a kind of atomized natural disaster without the physical destruction. Individuals are felled in their thousands, sent to hospital (if there is room) not knowing if they will survive. Just like a disaster or conflict, movement is severely restricted, health care systems and workers are under intense pressure, people are forming long queues for essential supplies which have had to be rationed at times. People had to stop being together as families, friends and communities, indeed doing anything that involved normal human interaction; if not, the virus would put them asunder by its own ruthless means of sickening or even killing them.

The timeline and the data that’s come in over the year shed new light on the way different countries have dealt with the disease and show what’s worked and what hasn’t. Dozens of countries have recorded more than a thousand deaths, but in others the case counts now stand at well over one million. (Bearing in mind differences in testing mean that the number of cases may be understated for some countries.) As rich and developed as the United Kingdom is, its political leaders were fatally slow to understand what they were facing and to act accordingly. It is desperately sad to see that there have been 4.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 125,464 deaths, reported to WHO. That’s in a population of around 67 million. The Philippines, with its population of some 108 million has seen far fewer in comparison. There have been 616,611 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 12,766 deaths reported to WHO.

Reading the news websites from both archipelagos, I’ve noticed how journalism meant for national markets has been nuanced and even limited. Early on in the pandemic, the UK news would report with horror the skyrocketing infection numbers out of China, Italy and Spain and the draconian measures that were being ordered by their governments and enforced by police and military. Those were the days when social media were full of video clips showing people singing together from balconies, windows and rooftops and joking about their daily commutes from bedroom to kitchen.

Fast forward a few months and the UK’s numbers were surpassing their European neighbors, and the reporting could have none of the frisson of underlying relief when it was about somewhere else. What struck me was that people here who don’t normally check news from anywhere other than the UK had no context by which to judge the way its leaders were handling the crisis. Understandably, political recriminations were muted. The opposition Labour Party supported the government, recognizing the emergency. Over the year or so encompassing the whole pandemic, the UK saw an incidence rate of 6,375 per 100,000. Compare that with Cambodia which has seen a total of just 1,325 cases in total. I may be wrong but I suspect that most people in the UK are not aware that the far less developed Southeast Asian nation outperformed the UK so dramatically. It certainly didn’t come up in the most watched national newscasts.

It works the other way too. When the awful daily summary of numbers of infected and deaths from the coronavirus is announced in the Philippines, the truth is that there are far fewer than in the UK, painful and terrible as each individual case is for the families involved. Now that there’s a lot more data to mine, what was suggested earlier on in the pandemic is even clearer. I think it shows that people in countries like the Philippines and Cambodia, with all their experience of conflict, SARS and bird flu, typhoons, floods and earthquakes, were far more responsive to the emergency. They understood and acted on the demands of the moment in a way that was far harder for people elsewhere who had not experienced such existential threats.

But the margin of success is sadly shrinking. The number of infections is rising again in the Philippines while it’s plummeting in the UK. The UK has been extraordinarily successful in its mass vaccination program – apparently people here are much better about getting injections than wearing face masks and hanging out together. As of March 8, 2021, a total of 23.7 million vaccine doses have been administered in the UK, but in the Philippines 13,629 vaccine doses have been administered. The vaccine advantage will make a huge difference when it comes to keeping public health systems functioning, being able to get shops and businesses open and travel and tourism businesses up and running.

The Philippines is as woefully behind in acquiring access to the vaccine as the UK has been successful. Surely, with the intricate and extensive trade and immigration linkages, this is a global problem? By this time next year, the UK government plans to have the economy open again (barring any further complications from COVID-19 variants). Experts say they don’t expect countries like the Philippines, which are relying on the Covax facility (designed to bridge the vaccine divide) for access to the vaccine, to be able to open until June 2023. Who knows what further devastation will be wreaked on societies and economies before then?

Will the richer nations continue to hold the advantage that vaccines seem to give them now; and will they stand by as the poor in less developed nations sicken and die in the relentless wildfire of infection? This disaster isn’t finished yet, not by a long shot.