In mid-October, Ditchley held its second ‘hybrid’ conference, Living with COVID-19: what are the implications for the world if a vaccine remains elusive? A group of participants at Ditchley was joined by a larger number of remote guests, who included epidemiologists, bioethicists, parliamentarians, banking and finance figures, tech and data experts, civil society figures and journalists and speakers from China, Singapore, India, South Africa and Japan who were invited to share their perspectives on national approaches taken to manage the pandemic.
This discussion was premised on the difficult scenario that we may be living with COVID-19 for the medium term and longer, and that the virus may become persistent while remaining deadly for certain sections of the population.
Discussions highlighted the importance of culture, values and local context in framing decisions made by governments and national policy responses. For example,
- China has combined an authoritarian system of state surveillance with strong social norms of respect for the elderly in an approach to comprehensively suppress the virus.
- Singapore’s strong civic leadership prioritised clear and sophisticated communications, border controls, management of foreign workforces and has effective virus control with very low numbers of deaths.
- In Japan, strong peer pressure (a national characteristic) and high public respect for scientific expertise has allowed the state to focus on areas of high transmission without resorting to compulsory lockdowns.
- For India, parts of Africa and the DRC, COVID-19 was one infectious disease among many to manage – with several, such as diarrhoea, malaria and H1N1 (for which there is a vaccine) leading, in some cases, to higher daily death tolls than COVID-19 – and the message was clear: the concept of lockdown can be inappropriate for societies that do not have national health systems to protect and where poverty kills in many ways.
In the US and the UK, measures to control and manage the pandemic have revealed weaknesses in democracy and highlighted the question: what is it about modern liberal democratic societies that makes a world without a vaccine so difficult to manage? The process of striking a balance between reducing threats to life and curtailing individual freedoms, civil liberties and economic well-being has become political and polarised, exploding the myth that political decision-making can simply follow the science.
As time goes on, the primary short-term objective of controlling and suppressing the virus is complicated by imperatives to keep the economy going and to reduce the (sometimes severe) harms caused by societal restrictions. Overtime, a broader and longer-term perspective may re-order priorities and change what it means to control of the virus. In living with COVID-19, society must adapt and find a workable accommodation – this may lead for example to a reorganisation of health systems. We may have to live with a gradual accumulation of immunity whether delivered by vaccine or acquired infection but in the meantime (in the UK), to save lives, virus suppression remains the government’s priority.
This pandemic has worsened pre-existing social and economic inequalities. At the same time, some business adaptations and social responses point to new opportunities that could be beneficial for whole societies. This conference described this moment as one to re-invest in democracy, invest in physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure and education; to rebalance the power of tech companies; and reset an ability to raise taxation revenue. The answer for liberal democratic societies is to define the public good, find a common programme for burden sharing and create space for the expression of the human spirit.
The full conference report will appear on the Past Events page of this website soon.