Airlines and oil giants are on the brink. No government should offer them a lifeline

This crisis is a chance to rebuild our economy for the good of humanity. Let’s bail out the living world, not its destroyers writes George Monbiot in The Guardian 

 

‘Governments have the oil industry over a barrel – hundreds of millions of unsaleable barrels, to be more precise – just as they had the banks over a barrel in 2008.’ Photograph: BEAWIHARTA/REUTERS


Do Not Resuscitate. This tag should be attached to the oil, airline and car industries. Governments should provide financial support to company workers while refashioning the economy to provide new jobs in different sectors. They should prop up only those sectors that will help secure the survival of humanity and the rest of the living world.

They should either buy up the dirty industries and turn them towards clean technologies, or do what they often call for but never really want: let the market decide. In other words, allow these companies to fail.

This is our second great chance to do things differently. It could be our last. The first, in 2008, was spectacularly squandered. Vast amounts of public money were spent reassembling the filthy old economy, while ensuring that wealth remained in the hands of the rich. Today, many governments appear determined to repeat that catastrophic mistake.

The “free market” has always been a product of government policy. If antitrust laws are weak, a few behemoths survive while everyone else goes down. If dirty industries are tightly regulated, clean ones flourish. If not, the corner-cutters win. But the dependency of enterprises on public policy has seldom been greater in capitalist nations than it is today. Many major industries are now entirely beholden to the state for their survival. Governments have the oil industry over a barrel – hundreds of millions of unsaleable barrels, to be more precise – just as they had the banks over a barrel in 2008. Then, they failed to use their power to eradicate the sector’s socially destructive practices and rebuild it around human needs. They are making the same mistake today.

The Bank of England has decided to buy debt from oil companies such as BP, Shell and Total. The government has given easyJet a £600m loan even though, just a few weeks ago, the company frittered away £171m in dividends: profit is privatised, risk is socialised. In the US, the first bailout includes $60bn (£48bn) for airlines. Overall, the bailout involves sucking as much oil as possible into strategic petroleum reserves and sweeping away pollution laws, while freezing out renewable energy. Several European countries are seeking to rescue their airlines and car manufacturers.

Don’t believe them when they tell you they do this on our behalf. A recent survey by Ipsos of 14 countries suggests that, on average, 65% of people want climate change to be prioritised in the economic recovery. Everywhere, electorates must struggle to persuade governments to act in the interests of the people, rather than the corporations and billionaires who fund and lobby them. The perennial democratic challenge is to break the bonds between politicians and the economic sectors they should be regulating, or, in this case, closing down.

Even when legislators seek to represent these concerns, their efforts are often feeble and naive. The recent letter to the government from a cross-party group of MPs calling for airlines to receive a bailout only if they “do more to tackle the climate crisis” could have been written in 1990. Air travel is inherently polluting. There are no realistic measures that could, even in the medium term, make a significant difference. We now know that the carbon offsetting schemes the MPs call for is useless: every economic sector needs to maximise cuts in greenhouse gases, so shifting the responsibility from one sector to another solves nothing. The only meaningful reform is fewer flights. Anything that impedes the contraction of the aviation industry impedes the reduction of its impacts.

The current crisis gives us a glimpse of how much we need to do to pull out of our disastrous trajectory. Despite the vast changes we have made in our lives, global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to reduce by only about 5.5% this year. A UN report shows that to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding 1.5C or more of global heating, we need to cut emissions by 7.6% per year for the next decade. In other words, the lockdown exposes the limits of individual action. Travelling less helps, but not enough. To make the necessary cuts we need structural change. This means an entirely new industrial policy, created and guided by government. 

Governments like the UK’s should drop their road-building plans. Instead of expanding airports, they should publish plans for reducing landing slots. They should commit to an explicit policy of leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

During the pandemic, many of us have begun to discover how much of our travel is unnecessary. Governments can build on this to create plans for reducing the need to move, while investing in walking, cycling and – when physical distancing is less necessary – public transport. This means wider pavements, better cycle lanes, buses run for service not profit. They should invest heavily in green energy, and even more heavily in reducing energy demand – through, for example, home insulation and better heating and lighting. The pandemic exposes the need for better neighbourhood design, with less public space given to cars and more to people. It also shows how badly we need the kind of security that a lightly taxed, deregulated economy cannot deliver.

In other words, let’s have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let’s not waste our second chance.

Javed Akhtar and Tarek Fatah Debate

"What is Wrong in India becoming a Hindu Rashtra?"Tahir Gora and Sanjay Dixit in Bilatakalluf

Should we be scared of the coronavirus debt mountain?

The pandemic has necessitated huge borrowing – but post-crisis austerity would be the very worst way to deal with it 

 

‘A world in which coronavirus debts are repaid by a wealth tax would look very different from one in which benefits are slashed and VAT is raised.’ Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA


We do not know how this pandemic will end. We do know that we will be poorer when it’s over: GDP is plunging around the world.

We also know that there will be a towering pile of IOUs left from the bills run up during the crisis. When it is over we will have to figure out how to repay them – or whether to repay them at all. That question will decide the complexion of our politics, and the quality of our public infrastructure and services for years to come. Unless we tackle this issue, coronavirus debts will be the battering ram for a new campaign of austerity.

The scale of the challenge is huge. Hard cases like Italy grab the headlines. Its debt currently stands at 135% of GDP. As a result of the crisis it will likely rise to 155%. But it is no longer an extreme outlier. According to the IMF, the debt ratio of the average advanced economy will exceed 120% next year. In the US, the debt to GDP ratio may soon surpass that at the end of the second world war.

These numbers are impressive, daunting even. They offer an open door to conservative scaremongering. The first move in that tradition of debt politics is to invoke the tenuous analogy to a household. In this picture, debts are a burden on the profligate; a moral obligation that must be honoured on pain of national bankruptcy and ruin.

There are some circumstances in which this analogy is apt, specifically when you are an impoverished and desperate country dependent on foreign creditors who will lend to you only in the currency of another country, most commonly that of the US. Many poorer countries are in this position. Few rich countries are. Indeed, one of the definitions of being an advanced economy is that you are not.

Advanced economies borrow in their own currency and overwhelmingly from their own citizens. For them, the household analogy is profoundly misleading. In fact, those seeking to rebut the misconceptions of the household analogy sometimes say we merely owe government debts to ourselves.

That is a liberating thought. It makes clear that we are not in the position of a subordinate debtor nation. But it has a dizzying circularity to it. If we are our own creditors, are we not also our own debtors – master and slave at the same time? Ultimately, it is a bon mot that relies on treating the economic nation as a unit. That may look like liberation, but it is an illusion achieved by removing the real politics of debt – which are about class, not nationality.

Historically, government debts were assets owned by the middle and upper classes, the famous rentiers. And taxes were overwhelmingly indirect and thus fell disproportionately on lower incomes.

Today, the richest still own a disproportionate share of government debt. But the liabilities of the government are now widely distributed. They are staple investments for pension funds and insurers. Government debt is not simply a burden; it is a highly useful financial asset, offering modest interest rates in exchange for safety. It is all the more useful for the fact that the government lives for ever and will generate revenue for ever through taxation. So it enables very long-term planning.

The tax base today is much broader than it was a century ago. But who pays taxes – and who does not – remains one of the most urgent questions of the moment. A world in which coronavirus debts are repaid by a wealth tax or a global crackdown on corporate tax havens would look very different from one in which benefits are slashed and VAT is raised. And it is very possible that debt service will be taken out of other spending, whether that be schools, pensions or national defence.

As the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter remarked in the aftermath of the first world war, “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies”, the truest reflection of the distribution of power and influence.
It is a distributional issue. But not only that. Debts may also affect the size of the cake itself. As we know only too well, a regime of austerity that keeps taxes high and government spending low is not conducive to rapid economic growth. And yet for debt to be sustainable, what we need is growth in GDP – to be precise, growth in nominal GDP, which includes real economic growth and inflation. Inflation matters because it acts as a tax on debts that are owed in money that is progressively losing its value. Price stability, the objective of monetary policy since the 1970s, no doubt has benefits for everyone, but most of all the creditor class.

This is the awesome dilemma we will face in the aftermath of Covid-19. This is the battle for which we must brace. Not right now, but once the immediate crisis has passed. After the financial crisis of 2007-08, it was in 2010 that the push for belt-tightening began. Like revenge, austerity is a dish best served cold.

Progressive politics cannot, of course, shrink from a battle about budgetary priorities. But it should resist fighting on the terms set by austerian debt-fear. In the circumstances of the UK or the US, alarmism about debt is false. And how false is being demonstrated by the crisis itself.

There is one mechanism through which we can ensure we truly owe the debts to ourselves. That mechanism is the central bank. Its principal job is to manage public debt – and at a moment of crisis central banks do what they must. They buy government debts or, in what amounts to the same thing, they open overdraft accounts for the government.

That has two effects that, acting together, have the potential to negate debt as a political issue. Central bank intervention lowers the interest rate. If interest rates are held down, debt service need not be an onerous burden. At the same time, the central bank purchases remove government IOUs from private portfolios and put them on the balance sheet of the central bank. There, they are literally claims by the public upon itself. 

When the central bank buys the debt it does so by creating money. Under ordinary circumstances one might worry about that causing inflation. But given the recession we face that is a risk worth running. Indeed modest inflation would help us by taking a bite out of the real value of the debt.

Of course, ensuring that the central banks continue their crisis-fighting methods into the recovery period will itself require a political battle. Fearmongering about inflation is the close cousin of fearmongering about debt. We should resist both blackmails. We have the institutions and techniques to neutralise the coronavirus debt problem. We owe it to ourselves to use them.

Nudge theory is a poor substitute for hard science in matters of life or death

Behavioural economics is being abused by politicians as a justification for flawed policies over the coronavirus outbreak writes Sonia Sodha in The Guardian 

Illustration: Dom McKenzie/The Observer


I first came across “nudge” – the concept many consider to be the pinnacle of behavioural economics – at a thinktank seminar a little over 10 years ago. We were all handed a mock wine menu and asked what we’d order.

This was supposed to illustrate that most price-aware diners order the second-cheapest bottle to avoid looking tight and that restaurateurs use this to nudge us towards the bottle with the highest markup. I remember thinking it an interesting insight, but that these sorts of nudges were nowhere near as likely to transform the world as their enthusiastic proponent claimed.

Lots of far more eminent people disagreed with me. Behavioural economics looks at how people make decisions in the real world – warts, irrational biases and all – and applies this to public policy. Its signature policy is set out in the 2008 book Nudge , by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. The central insight is that changing the way choices are presented to people can have a huge impact. Make saving for retirement or donating your organs an opt-out rather than opt-in and watch as people suddenly adopt more socially responsible behaviour. Coming just as the financial crisis hit, Nudge was perfectly timed to achieve maximum traction by offering politicians the chance to reap savings through low-cost policy. Sunstein was quickly appointed to a senior job in the Obama administration, while David Cameron set up the behavioural insights team, dubbed the “nudge unit”, led by psychologist turned policy wonk David Halpern.

The nudge unit has since had a mixed track record: there have been some real successes on pensions and tax payments but in other areas it’s been a bit of a damp squib. So I was surprised when Halpern popped up to talk about the government’s pandemic strategy in the press in early March. It was he who first publicly mentioned the idea of “herd immunity” as part of an effective response to Covid-19 (the government has since denied this was ever the strategy). And it’s clear from the briefing he gave journalists that he favoured delaying a lockdown because of the risk of “behavioural fatigue”, the idea that people will stick with restrictions for only so long, making it better to save social distancing for when more people are infected. “If you go too early and tell people to take a week off work when they are very unlikely to have coronavirus, and then a couple of weeks later they have another cough, it’s likely they’ll say ‘come on already’,” he told one reporter.

Halpern is reportedly on Sage, the government’s scientific advisory committee for emergencies, and he is also the government’s What Works national adviser, responsible for helping it apply evidence to public policy. So one might expect there to be something substantial behind the idea of behavioural fatigue. 

But evidence presented to government by the Sage behavioural subcommittee on 4 March, representing the views of a wider group of experts, was non-committal on the behavioural impact of a lockdown, noting that the empirical evidence on behavioural interventions in a pandemic is limited. Shortly after Halpern’s interviews, more than 600 behavioural economists wrote a letter questioning the evidence base for behavioural fatigue.

Rightly so: a rapid evidence review of behavioural science as it relates to pandemics only fleetingly refers to evidence that extending a lockdown might increase non-compliance, but this turns out to be a study about extending deployment in the armed forces. “Behavioural fatigue is a nebulous concept,” the review’s authors later concluded in the Irish Times.

This is a common critique of behavioural economics: some (not all) members of the discipline have a tendency to overclaim and overgeneralise, based on small studies carried out in a very different context, often on university students in academic settings. It’s extraordinary that Halpern was briefing on what essentially looks like his opinion as if it were science. We won’t know how influential it was in the government’s decision to delay lockdown until a post-hoc inquiry, but there’s no reason to suppose Boris Johnson wasn’t listening to his “what works” adviser. “The behavioural psychologists say that if you don’t shake somebody’s hand, that sends an important message… [about] washing your hands,” he said on 9 March.

It’s less extraordinary, though, when you understand that the Behavioural Insights Team is a multimillion-pound profitable company, which pays Halpern, who owns 7.5% of its shares, a bigger salary than the prime minister. Here lies the potential conflict of interest: someone who contributes to Sage also has a significant financial incentive to sell his wares. It perhaps explains BIT’s bombastic claims – “it’s no longer a matter of supposition… we can now say with a high degree of confidence these models give you best policy,” Halpern claimed in 2018. And: “We make much of the simplicity of our interventions… but if properly implemented, they can have a powerful impact on even our biggest societal challenges.” (It is worth noting that Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, says that one reason the composition of Sage has been kept private is to protect scientists from “lobbying and other forms of unwanted influence which may hinder their ability to give impartial advice”.)

This hubris has led some behavioural scientists to push their approach way beyond those realms such as consumer policy, where it has the potential to be most effective. My jaw dropped on reading a recent 70-page BIT report on applying behavioural insights to domestic abuse that included not one survivor’s voice and in which the word “trauma” appeared only once. It describes domestic abuse as a “phenomenon made up of multiple behaviours undertaken by different actors at different points in time”. Its recommendations are that strange mix of common sense dressed up as behavioural revelation and jarring suggestions that tend to characterise behavioural science when it overreaches itself.

Little wonder that a House of Lords committee was highly critical of government tendencies to emphasise nudges at the expense of other effective policy solutions in 2011. Nudges undoubtedly have their place, but they’re not going to eradicate domestic violence or end catastrophic climate change.

The problem with all forms of expertise in public policy is that it is often the most formidable salespeople who claim greater certainty than the evidence allows who are invited to jet around the world advising governments. But the irony for behavioural scientists is that this is a product of them trading off, and falling prey to, the very biases they have made their names calling out.

I can only imagine how easy it might have been for Johnson to succumb to confirmation bias in looking for reasons to delay a lockdown: what prime minister wants to shut down the economy? And it is the optimism bias of the behavioural tsars that has led them to place too much stock in their own judgement in a world of limited evidence. But this isn’t some experiment in a university psychology department - it is a pandemic and lives are at stake.

'Heads we win, tails you lose': how America's rich have turned pandemic into profit

As 26 million Americans lose their jobs, the billionaire class has added $308bn to its wealth writes Dominic Rushe and Mona Chalabi in The Guardian


 

Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth increase from $105bn to $130bn. Photograph: Mona Chalabi


Never let a good crisis go to waste: as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the world, America’s 1% have taken profitable advantage of the old saying.

Some of the richest people in the US have been at the front of the queue as the government has handed out trillions of dollars to prop up an economy it shuttered amid the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the billionaire class has added $308bn to its wealth in four weeks - even as a record 26 million people lost their jobs.

According to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank, between 18 March and 22 April the wealth of America’s plutocrats grew 10.5%. After the last recession, it took over two years for total billionaire wealth to get back to the levels they enjoyed in 2007.

Eight of those billionaires have seen their net worth surge by over $1bn each, including the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, and his ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos; Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom; the former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer; and Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX technocrat.

The billionaire bonanza comes as a flotilla of big businesses, millionaires and billionaires sail through loopholes in a $349bn bailout meant to save hard-hit small businesses. About 150 public companies managed to bag more than $600m in forgivable loans before the funds ran out. Among them was Shake Shack, a company with 6,000 employees valued at $2bn. It has since given the cash back but others have not.

Fisher Island, a members-only location off the coast of Miami where the average income of residents is $2.2m and the beaches are made from imported Bahamian sand, has received $2m in aid.

Its residents seemed to be doing fine even before the bailout. This month, the island purchased thousands of rapid Covid-19 blood test kits for all residents and workers. The rest of Florida is struggling. About 1% of Florida’s population has been tested for the coronavirus, behind the national figure of 4%. The state is also in the midst of an unemployment claims crisis, with its underfunded benefits system unable to cope with the volume of people filing.

The banks that were the largest recipients of bailout cash in the last recession have also done well, raking in $10bn in fees from the government loans, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

“Heads we win, tails you lose,” said Chuck Collins, director of the program on inequality and the common good at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of the new report.

Collins said the pandemic had further exposed fault lines in the US body politic that have been widening the gap between the really rich and the rest over decades.

“The rules of the economy have been tipped in favor of asset owners against everyone else,” said Collins.

By 2016 – seven years after the end of the last recession – the bottom 90% of households in the US had still not recovered from the last downturn while the top 10% had more wealth than they had in 2007.

Throughout the recovery, stock market gains disproportionately favored the wealthy. The top 1% of households own nearly 38% of all stock, according to research by the New York University economist Edward Wolff. Even before the coronavirus hit, homeownership in the US – a traditional source of wealth growth – was well below its 2004 peak.

Nor did Americans earn more. Wage growth remained sluggish during the decade-long record-breaking growth in the jobs market that came after the last recession.

For black and Latin Americans, the situation is worse. The black-white wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979.

Meanwhile, billionaires have been unable to put a well-heeled foot wrong. Billionaire wealth soared 1,130% in 2020 dollars between 1990 and 2020, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. That increase is more than 200 times greater than the 5.37% growth of median wealth in the US over this same period. And the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased 79% between 1980 and 2018.

So when the pandemic struck, those at the apex of the wealth pyramid were better positioned than ever to take advantage of the chaos. The rest, not so much.

Collins has been studying income inequality for 25 years and has seen the really rich win victory after victory. But even he was surprised by how quickly America’s billionaires have turned pandemic into profit. “I still get shocked,” he said.

Pakistan's Covid-19 strategy is to open Kashmir issue

In Urdu

Falsification of Indian History

Sanjay Dikshit

Part 2

Part 3

Corona Virus triggers Capitalism to Crash

Give Us Kerala Model Over Gujarat Model, Any Day

Ramachandra Guha in NDTV

When, towards the end of the first decade of the present century, Narendra Modi began speaking frequently about something he called the 'Gujarat Model', it was the second time a state of the Indian Union had that grand, self-promoting, suffix added to its name. The first was Kerala. The origins of the term 'Kerala Model' go back to a study done in the 1970s by economists associated with the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram. This showed that when it came to indices of population (as in declining birth rates), education (as in remarkably high literacy for women) and health (as in lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy), this small state in a desperately poor country had done as well - and sometimes better - than parts of Europe and North America.

Boosted to begin with by economists and demographers, Kerala soon came in for praise from sociologists and political scientists. The former argued that caste and class distinctions had radically diminished in Kerala over the course of the 20th century; the latter showed that, when it came to implementing the provisions of the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution, Kerala was ahead of other states. More power had been devolved to municipalities and panchayats than elsewhere in India.

Success, as John F. Kennedy famously remarked, has many fathers (while failure is an orphan). When these achievements of the state of Kerala became widely known, many groups rushed to claim their share of the credit. The communists, who had been in power for long stretches, said it was their economic radicalism that did it. Followers of Sri Narayana Guru (1855-1928) said it was the egalitarianism promoted by that great social reformer which led to much of what followed. Those still loyal to the royal houses of Travancore and Cochin observed that when it came to education, and especially girls' education, their Rulers were more progressive than Maharajas and Nawabs elsewhere. The Christian community of Kerala also chipped in, noting that some of the best schools, colleges, and hospitals were run by the Church. It was left to that fine Australian historian of Kerala and India, Robin Jeffrey, to critically analyse all these claims, and demonstrate in what order and what magnitude they contributed. His book Politics, Women and Wellbeing remains the definitive work on the subject.

Such were the elements of the 'Kerala Model'. What did the 'Gujarat Model' that Narendra Modi began speaking of, c. 2007, comprise? Mr Modi did not himself ever define it very precisely. But there is little doubt that the coinage itself was inspired and provoked by what had preceded it. The Gujarat Model would, Mr Modi was suggesting, be different from, and better than, the Kerala Model. Among the noticeable weaknesses of the latter was that it did not really encourage private enterprise. Marxist ideology and trade union politics both inhibited this. On the other hand, the Vibrant Gujarat Summits organized once every two years when Mr Modi was Chief Minister were intended precisely to attract private investment.

This openness to private capital was, for Mr Modi's supporters, undoubtedly the most attractive feature of what he was marketing as the 'Gujarat Model'. It was this that brought to him the support of big business, and of small business as well, when he launched his campaign for Prime Minister. Young professionals, disgusted by the cronyism and corruption of the UPA regime, flocked to his support, seeing him as a modernizing Messiah who would make India an economic powerhouse.

With the support of these groups, and many others, Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister in May 2014.

There were other aspects of the Gujarat Model that Narendra Modi did not speak about, but which those who knew the state rather better than the Titans of Indian industry were perfectly aware of. These included the relegation of minorities (and particularly Muslims) to second-class status; the centralization of power in the Chief Minister and the creation of a cult of personality around him; attacks on the independence and autonomy of universities; curbs on the freedom of the press; and, not least, a vengeful attitude towards critics and political rivals.

These darker sides of the Gujarat Model were all played down in Mr Modi's Prime Ministerial campaign. But in the six years since he has been in power at the Centre, they have become starkly visible. The communalization of politics and of popular discourse, the capturing of public institutions, the intimidation of the press, the use of the police and investigating agencies to harass opponents, and, perhaps above all, the deification of the Great Leader by the party, the Cabinet, the Government, and the Godi Media - these have characterized the Prime Ministerial tenure of Narendra Modi. Meanwhile, the most widely advertised positive feature of the Gujarat Model before 2014 has proved to be a dud. Far from being a free-market reformer, Narendra Modi has demonstrated that he is an absolute statist in economic matters. As an investment banker who once enthusiastically supported him recently told me in disgust: "Narendra Modi is our most left-wing Prime Minister ever - he is even more left-wing than Jawaharlal Nehru".

Which brings me back to the Kerala Model, which the Gujarat Model sought to replace or supplant. Talked about a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s, in recent years, the term was not much heard in policy discourse any more. It had fallen into disuse, presumably consigned to the dustbin of history. The onset of COVID-19 has now thankfully rescued it, and indeed brought it back to centre-stage. For in how it has confronted, tackled, and tamed the COVID crisis, Kerala has once again showed itself to be a model for India - and perhaps the world.

There has been some excellent reporting on how Kerala flattened the curve. It seems clear that there is a deeper historical legacy behind the success of this state. Because the people of Kerala are better educated, they have followed the practices in their daily life least likely to allow community transmission. Because they have such excellent health care, if people do test positive, they can be treated promptly and adequately. Because caste and gender distinctions are less extreme than elsewhere in India, access to health care and medical information is less skewed. Because decentralization of power is embedded in systems of governance, panchayat heads do not have to wait for a signal from a Big Boss before deciding to act. There are two other features of Kerala's political culture that have helped them in the present context; its top leaders are generally more grounded and less imperious than elsewhere, and bipartisanship comes more easily to the state's politicians.

The state of Kerala is by no means perfect. While there have been no serious communal riots for many decades, in everyday life there is still some amount of reserve in relations between Hindus, Christians and Muslims. Casteism and patriarchy have been weakened, but by no means eliminated. The intelligentsia still remain unreasonably suspicious of private enterprise, which will hurt the state greatly in the post-COVID era, after remittances from the Gulf have dried up.

For all their flaws, the state and people of Kerala have many things to teach us, who live in the rest of India. We forgot about their virtues in the past decade, but now these virtues are once more being discussed, to both inspire and chastise us. The success of the state in the past and in the present have rested on science, transparency, decentralization, and social equality. These are, as it were, the four pillars of the Kerala Model. On the other hand, the four pillars of the Gujarat Model are superstition, secrecy, centralization, and communal bigotry. Give us the first over the second, any day.

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How did Britain get its response to Coronavirus so wrong?

As the warnings grew louder, the government was distracted by Brexit. On testing, contact tracing and equipment supply, there was a failure to prepare by Toby Helm, Emma Graham-Harrison & Robin McKie in The Guardian



By late December last year, doctors in the central Chinese city of Wuhan were starting to worry about patients quarantined in their hospitals suffering from an unusual type of pneumonia.

As the mystery illness spread in one of China’s major industrial hubs, some tried to warn their colleagues to take extra care at work, because the disease resembled Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), the deadly respiratory disease that had killed hundreds of people across the region in 2002-03 after a government cover-up.

One of those who tried to raise the alarm, though only among a few medical school classmates, was a 33-year-old Chinese ophthalmologist, Li Wenliang. Seven people were in isolation at his hospital, he said, and the disease appeared to be a coronavirus, from the same family as Sars.

In early January he was called in by police, reprimanded for “spreading rumours online”, and forced to sign a paper acknowledging his “misdemeanour” and promising not to repeat it.

Many early cases were linked to the city’s Huanan seafood and fresh produce market, which also sold wildlife, suggesting that the first cases were contracted there.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The Wuhan hygiene emergency response team leave the closed Huanan seafood wholesale market on 11 January. Photograph: Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

Scientists would discover the disease had probably originated in bats and had then passed through a second species – in all likelihood, but not certainly, pangolins, a type of scaly anteater – before infecting humans.

But the infections were soon spreading directly between patients, so fast that on 23 January the government announced an unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan city and the surrounding Hubei province.

Two weeks later, on 7 February, Li, who had contracted coronavirus himself, died in hospital from the condition about which he had tried to raise the alarm. He had no known underlying conditions and left behind a wife and young child.

Li became the face of the mysterious new disease. The story of his death and pictures of him in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask made media headlines across the globe, including in the UK.

The world, it seemed, was slowly becoming more aware of how lethal coronavirus could be, that it was not just another form of flu with fairly mild symptoms.

But while UK scientists and medical researchers were becoming more concerned, and studying the evidence from China, those among them who were most worried were not getting their messages through to high places.

Distracted by Brexit and reshuffles

The Conservative government of Boris Johnson had other more immediate preoccupations at the start of this year.

Johnson was still basking in his general election success last December. After he returned from a celebratory Caribbean holiday with his fiancee, Carrie Symonds, the political weather for the prime minister seemed to be set fair. It was honeymoon time.

Three and a half years on from the Brexit referendum, the UK was finally about to leave the EU on 31 January. The fireworks and parties for the big night were being planned, the celebratory 50p coins minted.

Minds were certainly not on a developing health emergency far away, as Johnson prepared to exploit the moment of the UK’s departure from the European Union for all it was worth. “I think there was some over-confidence,” admitted one very senior Tory last week.

The prime minister and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, wanted to make an early impression at home in other ways too, as domestic reformers. Cummings was waging a war on civil servants in Whitehall, throwing his weight around and deliberately upsetting the Westminster applecart.

While he made the headlines, briefing about his iconoclastic ambitions, Johnson was preparing a big Cabinet reshuffle to assert his own authority in other areas now Brexit was done and dusted.

With Labour effectively leaderless after its fourth consecutive election defeat, there was little opposition to trouble Johnson on any front at all – and certainly no-one of note asking tough questions about coronavirus.

The prime minister duly recast his cabinet team on 13 February – five days after Li’s death in Wuhan. He made big changes but unsurprisingly retained the hitherto safe pair of hands of Matt Hancock as his health secretary.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Boris Johnson speaking about the EU on 3 February. Photograph: Reuters

In a sign of where priorities lay – and the lack of concern that a potential crisis might be heading our way from the east – Hancock wasted no time recording a video of himself grinning with delight on reshuffle day.

He smacked his right fist into his left palm saying he could not wait to “get cracking” and that he relished the chance to deliver the Tories’ manifesto promises, reform social care and improve life sciences. And lastly, in a more sombre voice, he spoke of “dealing with coronavirus and keeping the public safe” before adding, as the grin returned: “Now let’s get back to work!”

It is perhaps too early to conclude for sure that Johnson, Hancock and the government’s entire team of scientific and medical advisers were caught asleep at the wheel. But the fact that Johnson and Hancock themselves, in common with much of the Downing Street staff, would go on to contract the virus or suffer symptoms, further suggests that people at the top had not been sufficiently on their guard.

Now, 11 weeks on from the first cases being confirmed in the UK on 31 January – a period during which more than 14,000 people (and probably several thousands more once care home fatalities are counted) in the UK have died from Covid-19 – and with the country in lockdown, the economy facing prolonged recession as a result, schools closed, and no sign of an end in sight – hard questions have to be asked.

We already know with some certainty that other countries, such as Germany, South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand, will emerge from this crisis having performed far better than the UK. A few weeks ago the government’s advisers crassly said that fewer than 20,000 deaths would be “a very good result” for the UK.

As we fast approach that grim tally, many experts now believe the UK may come out of this crisis, whenever that may be, with one of the worst records on fighting coronavirus of any European nation. Once the full tally is counted, few expect the number of deaths to be below 20,000.

By contrast, on Friday, Germany was saying it thought it had brought coronavirus largely under control. It had had 3,868 deaths, less a third of the total in the UK (and Germany’s population, at 83 million, is far higher), having conducted widespread testing for Covid-19 from early on, precisely as the UK has failed to do.

How, then, did it come to this? How did coronavirus spread across the globe, prompting different responses in different countries? Did the UK simply fail to heed the warnings? Or did it just decide to take different decisions, while others settled on alternative actions to save lives?

The warnings grow louder

David Nabarro, professor of global health at Imperial College, London, and an envoy for the World Health Organization on Covid-19, says one thing is for sure. All governments were warned how serious the situation was likely to become as early as the end of January. Ignorance of the danger that was coming can be no excuse. Yet it would not be until late March – later than many other countries – that Johnson would announce a complete lockdown.

“WHO had been following the outbreak since the end of December and within a few weeks it called a meeting of its emergency committee to decide if this outbreak was a ‘public health emergency of international concern’,” said Nabarro.

“That is the highest level of alert that WHO can issue, and it issued it on January 30. It made it very clear then – to every country in the world – that we were facing something very serious indeed.”

Well before the end of January, the WHO had been tracking the growing threat minutely: 14 January was a key day in the spread of the disease that would become known as Covid-19. The first case was confirmed outside China, with a woman hospitalised in Thailand.

A WHO official warned then that it was possible that human-to-human transmission had occurred in families of victims – a sign that the disease had potential to spread far and fast – and, inside China, officials were quietly told to prepare for a pandemic.

There was little international attention on the day, though, because Beijing’s dire warnings about a pandemic were made in secret, and a WHO spokesman rowed back from his colleague’s claim.

Officially, China had not seen a new case of the coronavirus for over a week; the outbreak appeared to be fading. It took another six days for China to publicly acknowledge the gravity of the threat, time that scientists believed meant a further 3,000 people were infected.

But on 20 January, officials announced more than 100 new cases and admitted the virus was spreading between humans, a red flag for concern to anyone who works on infectious diseases. The virus could no longer be contained by finding the animal source of the infection and destroying it.

Two days later, the scale of the challenge was made clear to the general public when Beijing locked down millions of people. All transport into and out of the metropolis of Wuhan was cut off, an unprecedented modern quarantine that would come at huge human and economic cost.

On 29 January, the UK would have its first two confirmed cases of the disease. There was little sense that China’s dilemma and its approach – shut down life as we know it or watch the death toll spiral out of control – might have to be our nightmare within weeks.

In early February, Donald Trump announced a ban on travellers who had passed through China in the previous 14 days. Europe began focused testing of people with symptoms and travel histories that linked them to the disease, but little else. 

Johnson, it seemed, still had Brexit and free trade much more on his mind. Any hint of draconian action to fight coronavirus that might hurt the economy was the last thing he was entertaining.

In a speech on Brexit in Greenwich on 3 February, he made clear his views on Wuhan-style lockdowns. “We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric,” he said.

”Humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other.”

‘Herd immunity’: UK goes it alone

By early March it was abundantly clear to many academics and scientists that the approach being adopted by the UK was markedly different from those followed by other countries. From South Korea to Germany, governments had invested heavily in expanding testing capacity from the first weeks of the epidemic.

Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore had brought in controls on travellers from infected regions and strict contact tracing to help understand who could have been exposed, inform them and require self isolation. Face masks became widespread in east Asia, long before it was recommended elsewhere.

Testing and contact tracing has been at the heart of the approach advocated by the WHO, so that countries can establish how transmission chains were occurring, in order to break them.

Many also brought in some social distancing measures, banning large gatherings, closing schools or extending holidays, and encouraged those who could do to work from home. None were as extreme as China’s shutdown, or the European and American lockdowns that would follow.

Writing in the Observer last month, Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Ediburgh, noted the distinct UK approach. “Rather than learning from other countries and following the WHO advice, which comes from experts with decades of experience in tackling outbreaks across the world, the UK has decided to follow its own path. This seems to accept that the virus is unstoppable and will probably become an annual, seasonal infection.

“The plan, as explained by the chief science adviser, is to work towards ‘herd immunity’, which is to have the majority of the population contract the virus, develop antibodies and then become immune to it. This theory has been widely used to advocate for mass vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella. The thinking is that, if most of the population is vaccinated, a small percentage can go unvaccinated without cases emerging.”

It was not just the UK whose politicians and scientific advisers were, arguably, slow to act in the early stages. Others countries, including Spain and France, were caught out too, but it was Italy’s tragedy that alerted Europe to the scale of the threat it faced.

European governments and citizens were forced to reckon with the reality that in an age of global travel, the thousands of miles separating them from China meant almost nothing at all. Thousands of Britons were holidaying in Italy the week that it shut down. They were advised to go into self-quarantine on return, but were not registered by the health authorities, nor were their contacts tracked.

Italy and the UK had both had had their first case a day apart at the end of January, but cases rose faster in Italy. The country may just have been unlucky that carriers of the disease flew to its northern cities and ski resorts rather than to other European capitals.

Whatever the reason, cases and then deaths started climbing sharply in northern Italy in late February. Dozens of towns were locked down from the 21st, but in the rest of the country life carried on as normal.

It was soon clear that the problem had not been contained. On 8 March, the prime minister, Guiseppe Conti, quarantined 16 million people across the north of the country, and the next day extended the lockdown to all of Italy.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Russian biological warfare troops, called in by the Italian authorities, disinfect the Pope John Paul I care home near Bergamo. Photograph: Russian Defence Ministry/TASS

The measures saved lives, but came too late for thousands of Italians. The death toll outstripped China, and the world looked on horrified as hospitals were overwhelmed, doctors forced to choose who should have a chance on a ventilator and who should die. On 11 March, the WHO declared a global pandemic. On 14 March, Spain went into lockdown, and three days later France did the same.

But in the UK there appeared to be greater reluctance to act decisively with lockdowns: the banning of mass gatherings and the closure of pubs and restaurants. The government’s scientific and behavioural science advisers were warning ministers that the public might react badly to draconian measures and would not tolerate them for long.

In an apparent show of defiance against the lockdowners, Johnson and Symonds attended the England v Ireland rugby match at Twickenham on 7 March. The Cheltenham Festival, attended over three days to 13 March by 250,000 racegoers, was allowed to go ahead.

Shutdown: Johnson changes tack

The tone was about to change. In a Downing Street press conference on 12 March, Johnson, who had said a few days before the first UK death that the disease was “likely to spread a bit more” suddenly became the deliverer of grave warnings.

Previous talk by his advisers of avoiding lockdowns and developing “herd immunity” had been banished and replaced by a brutal honesty. “I must level with you,” Johnson told reporters. “More families, many more families, are going to lose loved ones before their time.” On 18 March – just days after Downing Street had suggested it was not on the cards – the government announced the closure of all schools until further noticed. Pubs and restaurants were ordered to shut on 20 March. The UK had come late into line.

One former cabinet minister last week described the change of approach as a “screeching U-turn”. Johnson and his ministers were now, even more than before, taking cover behind, and advice from, their scientific and medical advisers. Many of these advisers had become increasingly concerned that the UK had become out of step with other countries because of political resistance from ministers to measures that would hit the economy. The Observer has been told that at least two senior government advisers were on the brink of of quitting before Johnson switched his approach.

The government has found itself unable to escape the consequences of a wider failure to prepare. As hospitals threatened to be overwhelmed before orders were given to massively expand capacity, ministers came under intense criticism over the lack of protective equipment for frontline NHS staff, over the lack of ventilators for patients in intensive care, and for a failure to test more widely for Covid-19, particularly among NHS workers.

The lack of preparedness and instances of chaotic planning has shocked many in and outside the NHS.

Last week, Dr Alison Pittard, the dean of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, the professional body for intensive care practitioners, said the minimum specifications for the government’s own homegrown ventilator scheme would produce machines that would only treat patients “for a few hours”. “If we had been told that that was the case… we’d have said: ‘Don’t bother, you’re wasting your time. That’s of no use’,” she told the Financial Times.

Last month the government missed an EU procurement deadline for ventilators because, minister said, an email went unnoticed. The NHS had said 30,000 more would be needed, Hancock reduced this to 18,000. Pittard said her faculty had been warning for years about a shortage of intensive care capacity and intensive care nurses in hospitals.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Boris Johnson and partner Carrie Symonds with the England captain Owen Farrell at Twickenham on 7 March. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

Normally each intensive care patient would have one intensive care nurse in attendance all the time, she said. Now there was one nurse to six patients, although other staff had been redeployed to intensive care units to plug the gaps and the new system was working because of heroic efforts. Although she was reluctant to criticise the government, she said that if the faculty had been listened to, “we wouldn’t be starting from this place”. Germany, she pointed out, has 29 intensive care beds per 100,000 people, compared with six in the UK.

The Tory MP and former health minister Dan Poulter, who works part-time in the NHS, said that given the enormity of the challenge facing government “it almost seems wrong to be critical”.

But he believes part of the problem is that insufficient advice has been sought from experienced NHS clinicians who would have warned of problems with PPE early on, of the shortage of ventilators and would have told ministers of the urgent need to test NHS staff.

“An early over-reliance on academic modelling also resulted in a lack of experienced frontline NHS clinicians – in other words, the people who really understand the day-to-day challenges our hospitals and health service face – from feeding into the initial Covid-19 action plan,” he said. “This has manifested itself amongst other things in the slowness of providing adequate PPE for frontline NHS staff and in the lack of virus testing for healthcare staff in the earlier part of the outbreak.”

How the scientists reacted

When the investigations into the UK’s response to Covid-19 come to be written, there is widespread recognition among experts that this lack of long-term strategic planning will be at the centre of it. So too should be the need to ensure that the views of experts are fed into government more efficiently and widely. The prospect of a previously unknown disease spreading catastrophically around the globe and infecting millions is, after all, not a new one.

Indeed, many warnings have been given in the past about the viral dangers facing humanity. “Given the continual emergence of new pathogens ... and the ever-increasing connectedness of our world, there is a significant probability that a large and lethal pandemic will occur in our lifetime,” Bill Gates predicted several years ago. “And it will have the impact of a nuclear war,” he warned, while urging nations to start stockpiling antiviral drugs and therapies. If only.

For its part, the WHO prepared – several years ago – a list of viruses with no known treatments or vaccines, illnesses that could one day trigger that pandemic and kill hundreds of thousands. Prospective killers included nipah disease and lassa fever as well as an ailment it simply called “disease X” – “a serious international epidemic caused by a pathogen currently unknown”.

As to the most likely nature of that mysterious virus, most modelling assumed that disease X would be flu-like in behaviour, says Dr Josie Golding, the epidemics lead at the Wellcome Trust. After all, influenza had caused so many deadly global outbreaks in the past. As a result, a lot of investment went into making influenza vaccines in preparation, she says. “But have we been thinking about diseases other than influenza that might become pandemics? I don’t think we have. There has been a real gap in our thinking.”

Then came the appearance of Covid-19 – caused not by a strain of influenza but by a coronavirus – in November. Initially, only a few cases were highlighted, a trend that began to change early this year with a rise in numbers of infected ill people.

“The report that really grabbed my attention came out in mid-January,” says epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse at Edinburgh University. “It said 41 cases of this new respiratory illness had now been diagnosed in one small area of China, around Wuhan. And that set the alarm bells ringing for me.”

For Woolhouse, the cluster of cases in one place showed this was not a matter of a few people scattered around China picking up an occasional infection from an animal such as a bat or a chicken. “Forty-one cases in one small area at the same time could not be explained that way. People are not picking this up from animals, I realised. They are actually spreading it to each other. It was already heading out of control.”

Ewan Birney, head of the European Bioinfomatics Institute in Cambridgeshire, also noted the significance of the new disease at the time. “I presumed, at first, that this one would also burn itself out, probably somewhere in Asia,” he says.

His reasoning was straightforward. The outbreak of Sars that appeared in 2003 in China was caused by a coronavirus and killed more than 10% of those it infected. “In fact, it killed or hospitalised so many of those it infected the chain of transmission from one person to others was cut. It was too lethal for its own good. So I thought this might happen with this new disease. But it turns out Covid-19 is much milder and incapacitates fewer individuals, so there is no cut in its transmission. When that became apparent – around mid-January – I became very worried.”

Then there was the infectiousness of the new virus. A person with Sars generally starts to display symptoms before they infect other people. That makes it much easier to contain. But this was not the case with Covid-19. Early data from China – again released in January – showed the virus was being spread from people who were displaying only the mildest symptoms, or in some cases no symptoms. This was making the condition very difficult to track, says virologist Professor Jonathan Ball of Nottingham University.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The County Oak Medical Centre in Brighton was closed on 10 February after a member of staff was infected with coronavirus. Photograph: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images

“At that point I realised this outbreak was going to be very serious,” he added. “I sent a tweet to a colleague in Australia. It simply said: ‘This one is out of the bag properly’. He sent one back agreeing with me.”

Around this time, Paul Nurse, Nobel laureate and head of the Francis Crick Institute, recalls attending a conference where he met Mark Wolpert, head of UK Research and Innovation, the organisation that funds a vast slice of British scientific research.

“He had just received a text message from a colleague about the outbreak and we started to discuss the implications,” Nurse recalls. “It did not take us long for us both to realise this was going to be very significant. It took another two or three weeks to confirm these worst fears – by mid-February.”

By this time, Birney had realised the virus had a real sting in its tail and could cause serious illness among the elderly and those with other underlying serious ailments. “It was half-term and I was on holiday with my parents. All I wanted to do was to get the holiday over and then get them back to their house in the country where they could keep themselves isolated.”

In February, sporadic cases of Covid-19 were appearing round the country, recalls Tom Wingfield, a clinician and infectious disease expert based at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. “These were cases that had been brought into the country, mainly from China or Italy. Then there was an outbreak in Brighton and I realised that the virus had established itself in a community there. It was a turning point.”

Britain was still doing quite well in containing the disease by testing, tracing contact and setting up quarantine for those suspected of being infected with Covid-19 at this time. “Then, in March, the government decided to abandon this approach and shift from containing the disease to delaying its progress,” says Wingfield. “I would really like to know why the decision to give up testing and contact tracing was taken.”

Many other researchers also question why the government took so long to react to their warnings. “Part of the trouble was there were other virologists who were saying this was going to be like Sars or flu and there was not too much to worry about,” says Ball. “But Sars happened in 2003. The world is much more connected now than it was then. More to the point, Covid-19 was also much more infectious than Sars. And so it started appearing in lots of other countries. 

“Perhaps some of us should have got up in front of BBC News and said you lot ought to be petrified because this is going to be a pandemic that will kill hundreds of thousands of people,” adds Ball. “None of us thought this was a particularly constructive thing to do, but maybe with hindsight we should have. If there had been more voices, maybe politicians would have taken this a bit more seriously.”

“There is no question that we were insufficiently prepared,” Nurse says. “We had been warned a few years ago when reports made it clear that the UK was not ready to combat a major flu pandemic and we did not take up that warning. As a result, we were caught out.”

He and many others say an inquiry into Britain’s Covid-19 preparedness will have to be held at some point but stress that this should not be started until the crisis has been dealt with in the UK.

Professor Ian Boyd, a former chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, agrees. “There is a great danger there will be a lot of looking back with the benefits of hindsight and poking fingers of blame,” warns Boyd. “But when you are in the middle of things you have to make a lot of very hard 50-50 decisions, and sometimes you make the wrong call. On the other hand, there is no harm in making sure that we learn as many lessons as we can.”

The lessons from the rest of the world …

Boris Johnson, after his own brush with death at the hands of Covid-19, will presumably no longer take the gung-ho attitude to illness that he has always has. A former Tory minister said: “If Boris had any sense he would take control of the inquiry and lead it.”
One conclusion that experts are already drawing is that it was those countries close to China, with memories of Sars, or cultural ties to their neighbour, which were much faster to act in response to Covid-19. Perhaps most notable in its success was Taiwan. Closely linked by economic and cultural ties to mainland China, Taiwan could have been at high risk of a major Covid-19 epidemic. Tourists and business people travelled regularly back and forth.

But helped perhaps by having an epidemiologist as vice-president, the government set up a gold standard regime of testing and contact tracing that means that nearly three months on from its first confirmed infection, it has registered fewer than 400 cases and six deaths.

Taiwan’s extensive testing and thorough contact tracing are precisely the kind of action that the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt is demanding before the UK lockdown is lifted. Hunt points out that it is one of the essential conditions set by the WHO to avoid a second wave resulting from an easing of restrictions.

Hong Kong, which also suffered from the Sars crisis, also moved early to enforce quarantine and social distancing, as well as widespread mask wearing, and today has registered just over 1,000 cases and only four deaths.

FacebookTwitterPinterest A man in Wuhan on 10 February, the 19th day of the transport lockdown. Photograph: Getty Images

In late February, South Korea looked like it was on a trajectory to disaster, with the highest number of confirmed cases outside China, and numbers rising rapidly. But after the country’s first infection, the government met medical companies and urged them to start developing coronavirus test kits on a massive scale.

The results were impressive. When the epidemic hit, it was ready to deploy largescale testing. Its measures allowed South Korea to become the second country to flatten its coronavirus curve, without the sweeping shutdowns of society and economic activity that China had pioneered and the west would be forced to adopt.

China’s experience should have provided a grim template for western countries to use to prepare. The speed with which Wuhan’s crisis had intensified showed that a relatively advanced medical system could be swamped. Within three weeks there were over 64,000 people infected and 1,000 dead.

The pleas for help from Wuhan’s residents and doctors were to be echoed by those from Italy a few weeks later, and soon after the UK.

Look back three months, and in China there were not enough tests to work out who had coronavirus, there was not enough protective equipment for medical staff treating patients, and then, soon, tragically there were not enough hospital beds and ventilators for sick patients. These are exactly the challenges faced by authorities from New York to Rome, London to Madrid.

… and the other country that didn’t listen

If the UK has serious questions to answer, the country that so far has seen the worst of the outbreak, the United States, was slowest of all to act. Trump for months ignored, played down or lied about the threat posed by coronavirus, leaving individual states to act unilaterally as it became clear it had already taken hold on US soil.

On 17 March parts of California issued “shelter in place” orders, effectively a lockdown. By the end of that week New York City had also shut down, along with a dozen states, and the majority of the rest of the country had put some restrictions in place. Only five states had few or no controls.

There have now been nearly 700,000 confirmed cases in the US and over 33,000 deaths; actual numbers are likely to be higher for both. The economy has also been devastated, with more than 22 million out of work as businesses collapse or shrink under the strain.

The US was slowest of all to act, but Donald Trump is preparing to lift restrictions already. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP

Trump insists the US is turning a corner, and has tried to blame – among other targets – the WHO for failing to fully raise the alarm, and has stripped it of its US funding.

There have certainly been questions about the organisation’s strong praise for China and the exclusion of Taiwan, which may have contributed to the delay in recognising human-to-human transmission was occurring. But it began daily briefings on 22 January and had declared a global health emergency by the end of that month.

While initially sceptical about China’s distancing measures, it urged other countries to adopt them once there was evidence they were working. It warned about shortages of PPE over a month ago, and since the beginning of the outbreak has urged countries, including the UK, to “test, test, test” to contain the virus – a strategy followed by almost all countries that have managed to suppress it.  

A senior Whitehall source with detailed knowledge of the UK’s response and those of other countries said: “The fact is that those countries who knew a lot about Sars quickly saw the danger. But in the UK the attitude among politicians and also scientists was that it was really just some form of a flu. All the government’s pandemic planning was based on a flu scenario. And then it turned out to be something different and far, far worse and the response was completely inadequate.”

And we are going to be living with the consequences for a long time. Don’t expect a vaccine to come to the rescue in the short term, says Nabarro. “For the foreseeable future, we are going to have to find ways to go about our lives with this virus as a constant threat to our lives. That means isolating those who show signs of the disease and also their contacts. Older people will have to be protected. That is going to be the new normal for us all.”