Ten ways to judge governments over coronavirus

The coronavirus epidemic is an extraordinary test of government – really, every government in the world. In a way that does not happen with wars, or even with climate change, every country is facing an almost identical threat. But they start with very different systems of government, from democracy to autocracy, and their leaders are choosing to respond very differently. This is how they should be judged.​

1. Nature of government

The Chinese leadership has chosen to suggest the results are a victory for authoritarianism, given its success in all but eliminating new cases of the virus from Wuhan, where it started. Yet even in these early months of the virus’s spread around the world, there are comparative successes among democratic countries, such as South Korea. In the end, the sustainability of severe measures like lockdown, even in China, will depend to an extent on public consent. That may be easier to procure for governments trusted by their people.

A more fruitful debate may lie in whether federalism (and devolution of powers to regions, as in the UK) has been an asset or hindrance. In these early days, looking at the competition between states in the US, it looks more like the latter. Nor did Scotland’s move to shut schools and building sites before England help public trust in government overall. Nor have different interpretations of legislation by the UK’s police forces. Some steps clearly need to be standardised nationally – such as testing policy, or policing goals, or the procedure is futile. On the other hand, the scale of response needed is so enormous, central government has to delegate much of it to the local level.

2. How many deaths from Covid – and other illnesses?

This is the big one. Governments are bound to be compared by the death total from Covid-19. There are good reasons why it might differ; there has been speculation whether Italy was “unlucky” in getting an early cluster of cases, and the illness hit its comparatively elderly population hard. The rest of the world had the advantage of several weeks’ warning. All the same, political leaders know they will be judged by some sense of “lives that could have been saved” – as well as the ones they did save.

It is too early for this to be a factor now, but the question of how many people died of non-Covid illnesses who might otherwise have lived had health services not been so strained may well be part of assessing governments’ success in retrospect.

3. Were governments prepared?

The crisis has thrown a spotlight on the big differences between countries’ health systems – and preparation for an epidemic. The NHS has scored well on some counts simply because it is truly national. The UK did have pandemic disease at the top of the government risk register before coronavirus. But that was interpreted almost entirely as risk of a type of flu, rather than a SARS-type virus. In turn, that affected assumptions about speed of vaccine development and use of other drugs to slow transmission. It is perhaps unfair to expect that the UK had previously stocked up on ventilators; there is an enormous risk of “fighting the last war”. But it has been comparatively short of intensive care units while an ageing population and tight budgets have strained its capacity.

4. Speed of response to emergency

Some countries (such as Britain) had more warning than others. People will rightly look at how quickly they acted, not just on trying to control the virus’s spread (through travel and socialising restrictions) but also developing a strategy for combatting the disease and on their economic packages, trying to protect the economy from the hibernation necessary for public health.

5. Plan for recovery

This is hardly the focus now. But it soon may be, as soon as a testing regime begins to suggest a route out of current measures. Governments will then face more difficult and explicit choices. It will no longer be “whatever it takes”, as the UK chancellor Rishi Sunak said on launching the first emergency support package, but a question of who and what to support, and when to withdraw government help. Governments will have a fiendishly difficult series of decisions on trying to restart economies in deep recession, while still controlling the virus.

6. International cooperation

Coronavirus has not been a showcase for global coordination. There has been a competitive scramble for medical supplies. But on the scientific side, there are signs of more cooperation, especially on pooling trial data of work on anti-virals and the steps to vaccines.

7. Preserving trust through openness 

Governments may be starting from many different places on the civil liberties they permit their citizens, but some have gone further than others in taking emergency powers for themselves. Top of the tree is Hungary, where prime minister Viktor Orban used his majority in parliament to pass legislation enabling him to rule by decree indefinitely. Many governments will find that they can preserve trust of citizens only through openness. They will need to balance their relationship with the digital giants carefully; companies like Amazon and Netflix and videoconference platforms like Zoom have owned the lockdown, while Google has location data that governments may find valuable in trying to map the disease – although citizens might well find use of anything but anonymised data unacceptable. Yet public trust in those companies has been shaken – and there is public pressure for them to pay more tax, which governments will badly need.

8. Maintaining other priorities

No one is talking about climate change at the moment, and the COP26 summit in Glasgow in November has been delayed. Yet governments had other priorities before the virus blasted those away, such as the UK government’s aim of “levelling up” neglected regions – not to mention Brexit. They will be judged by whether they have managed to retain any of these.

9. Aid for poorer countries

The virus appears to have cut its first swathe through some of the world’s richest countries. But cases are now rising in the Middle East and sub Saharan Africa. Despite the heat (there has been unconfirmed speculation – popular in those countries – that the virus finds this less hospitable) and the comparative youth of the populations, these are not countries with lavish health systems. The effects could be devastating. Richer countries have good reason to help by diverting some of their existing development aid to this cause; that reason might begin with self-interest, to avoid migration and the creation of “sinks” of the disease, but extends far beyond it. Without this help, these countries could suffer a huge blow to their governability, compounding a human tragedy.

10. Sense of a strategy

In the end, citizens will judge a government by that intangible sense of whether they think it has had a plan to manage the disease. In what everyone would acknowledge are astoundingly difficult circumstances, they will look at whether it remained as in control as possible, and took decisions that were in the spirit both of what the public said it wanted at the time and what it thought the country needed in the emergency and beyond.