argumentative essay about government dealing with pandemic

The complexity of managing COVID-19: How important is good governance?

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Alaka m. basu , amb alaka m. basu professor, department of global development - cornell university, senior fellow - united nations foundation kaushik basu , and kaushik basu nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development jose maria u. tapia jmut jose maria u. tapia student - cornell university.

November 17, 2020

13 min read

This essay is part of “ Reimagining the global economy: Building back better in a post-COVID-19 world ,” a collection of 12 essays presenting new ideas to guide policies and shape debates in a post-COVID-19 world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacy of public health systems worldwide, casting a shadow that we could not have imagined even a year ago. As the fog of confusion lifts and we begin to understand the rudiments of how the virus behaves, the end of the pandemic is nowhere in sight. The number of cases and the deaths continue to rise. The latter breached the 1 million mark a few weeks ago and it looks likely now that, in terms of severity, this pandemic will surpass the Asian Flu of 1957-58 and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968-69.

Moreover, a parallel problem may well exceed the direct death toll from the virus. We are referring to the growing economic crises globally, and the prospect that these may hit emerging economies especially hard.

The economic fall-out is not entirely the direct outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic but a result of how we have responded to it—what measures governments took and how ordinary people, workers, and firms reacted to the crisis. The government activism to contain the virus that we saw this time exceeds that in previous such crises, which may have dampened the spread of the COVID-19 but has extracted a toll from the economy.

This essay takes stock of the policies adopted by governments in emerging economies, and what effect these governance strategies may have had, and then speculates about what the future is likely to look like and what we may do here on.

Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market.

It is becoming clear that the scramble among several emerging economies to imitate and outdo European and North American countries was a mistake. We get a glimpse of this by considering two nations continents apart, the economies of which have been among the hardest hit in the world, namely, Peru and India. During the second quarter of 2020, Peru saw an annual growth of -30.2 percent and India -23.9 percent. From the global Q2 data that have emerged thus far, Peru and India are among the four slowest growing economies in the world. Along with U.K and Tunisia these are the only nations that lost more than 20 percent of their GDP. 1

COVID-19-related mortality statistics, and, in particular, the Crude Mortality Rate (CMR), however imperfect, are the most telling indicator of the comparative scale of the pandemic in different countries. At first glance, from the end of October 2020, Peru, with 1039 COVID-19 deaths per million population looks bad by any standard and much worse than India with 88. Peru’s CMR is currently among the highest reported globally.

However, both Peru and India need to be placed in regional perspective. For reasons that are likely to do with the history of past diseases, there are striking regional differences in the lethality of the virus (Figure 11.1). South America is worse hit than any other world region, and Asia and Africa seem to have got it relatively lightly, in contrast to Europe and America. The stark regional difference cries out for more epidemiological analysis. But even as we await that, these are differences that cannot be ignored.

To understand the effect of policy interventions, it is therefore important to look at how these countries fare within their own regions, which have had similar histories of illnesses and viruses (Figure 11.2). Both Peru and India do much worse than the neighbors with whom they largely share their social, economic, ecological and demographic features. Peru’s COVID-19 mortality rate per million population, or CMR, of 1039 is ahead of the second highest, Brazil at 749, and almost twice that of Argentina at 679.

Similarly, India at 88 compares well with Europe and the U.S., as does virtually all of Asia and Africa, but is doing much worse than its neighbors, with the second worst country in the region, Afghanistan, experiencing less than half the death rate of India.

The official Indian statement that up to 78,000 deaths 2 were averted by the lockdown has been criticized 3 for its assumptions. A more reasonable exercise is to estimate the excess deaths experienced by a country that breaks away from the pattern of its regional neighbors. So, for example, if India had experienced Afghanistan’s COVID-19 mortality rate, it would by now have had 54,112 deaths. And if it had the rate reported by Bangladesh, it would have had 49,950 deaths from COVID-19 today. In other words, more than half its current toll of some 122,099 COVID-19 deaths would have been avoided if it had experienced the same virus hit as its neighbors.

What might explain this outlier experience of COVID-19 CMRs and economic downslide in India and Peru? If the regional background conditions are broadly similar, one is left to ask if it is in fact the policy response that differed markedly and might account for these relatively poor outcomes.

Peru and India have performed poorly in terms of GDP growth rate in Q2 2020 among the countries displayed in Table 2, and given that both these countries are often treated as case studies of strong governance, this draws attention to the fact that there may be a dissonance between strong governance and good governance.

The turnaround for India has been especially surprising, given that until a few years ago it was among the three fastest growing economies in the world. The slowdown began in 2016, though the sharp downturn, sharper than virtually all other countries, occurred after the lockdown.

On the COVID-19 policy front, both India and Peru have become known for what the Oxford University’s COVID Policy Tracker 4 calls the “stringency” of the government’s response to the epidemic. At 8 pm on March 24, 2020, the Indian government announced, with four hours’ notice, a complete nationwide shutdown. Virtually all movement outside the perimeter of one’s home was officially sought to be brought to a standstill. Naturally, as described in several papers, such as that of Ray and Subramanian, 5 this meant that most economic life also came to a sudden standstill, which in turn meant that hundreds of millions of workers in the informal, as well as more marginally formal sectors, lost their livelihoods.

In addition, tens of millions of these workers, being migrant workers in places far-flung from their original homes, also lost their temporary homes and their savings with these lost livelihoods, so that the only safe space that beckoned them was their place of origin in small towns and villages often hundreds of miles away from their places of work.

After a few weeks of precarious living in their migrant destinations, they set off, on foot since trains and buses had been stopped, for these towns and villages, creating a “lockdown and scatter” that spread the virus from the city to the town and the town to the village. Indeed, “lockdown” is a bit of a misnomer for what happened in India, since over 20 million people did exactly the opposite of what one does in a lockdown. Thus India had a strange combination of lockdown some and scatter the rest, like in no other country. They spilled out and scattered in ways they would otherwise not do. It is not surprising that the infection, which was marginally present in rural areas (23 percent in April), now makes up some 54 percent of all cases in India. 6

In Peru too, the lockdown was sudden, nationwide, long drawn out and stringent. 7 Jobs were lost, financial aid was difficult to disburse, migrant workers were forced to return home, and the virus has now spread to all parts of the country with death rates from it surpassing almost every other part of the world.

As an aside, to think about ways of implementing lockdowns that are less stringent and geographically as well as functionally less total, an example from yet another continent is instructive. Ethiopia, with a COVID-19 death rate of 13 per million population seems to have bettered the already relatively low African rate of 31 in Table 1. 8

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability.

The way forward

We next move from the immediate crisis to the medium term. Where is the world headed and how should we deal with the new world? Arguably, that two sectors that will emerge larger and stronger in the post-pandemic world are: digital technology and outsourcing, and healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

The last 9 months of the pandemic have been a huge training ground for people in the use of digital technology—Zoom, WebEx, digital finance, and many others. This learning-by-doing exercise is likely to give a big boost to outsourcing, which has the potential to help countries like India, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Globalization may see a short-run retreat but, we believe, it will come back with a vengeance. Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market. This realization will make most countries reverse their knee-jerk anti-globalization; and the ones that do not will cease to be important global players. Either way, globalization will be back on track and with a much greater amount of outsourcing.

To return, more critically this time, to our earlier aside on Ethiopia, its historical and contemporary record on tampering with internet connectivity 9 in an attempt to muzzle inter-ethnic tensions and political dissent will not serve it well in such a post-pandemic scenario. This is a useful reminder for all emerging market economies.

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability. This could divert some demand from luxury goods to better health, and what is best described as “creative consumption”: art, music, and culture. 10 The former will mean much larger healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors.

But to take advantage of these new opportunities, nations will need to navigate the current predicament so that they have a viable economy once the pandemic passes. Thus it is important to be able to control the pandemic while keeping the economy open. There is some emerging literature 11 on this, but much more is needed. This is a governance challenge of a kind rarely faced, because the pandemic has disrupted normal markets and there is need, at least in the short run, for governments to step in to fill the caveat.

Emerging economies will have to devise novel governance strategies for doing this double duty of tamping down on new infections without strident controls on economic behavior and without blindly imitating Europe and America.

Here is an example. One interesting opportunity amidst this chaos is to tap into the “resource” of those who have already had COVID-19 and are immune, even if only in the short-term—we still have no definitive evidence on the length of acquired immunity. These people can be offered a high salary to work in sectors that require physical interaction with others. This will help keep supply chains unbroken. Normally, the market would have on its own caused such a salary increase but in this case, the main benefit of marshaling this labor force is on the aggregate economy and GDP and therefore is a classic case of positive externality, which the free market does not adequately reward. It is more a challenge of governance. As with most economic policy, this will need careful research and design before being implemented. We have to be aware that a policy like this will come with its risk of bribery and corruption. There is also the moral hazard challenge of poor people choosing to get COVID-19 in order to qualify for these special jobs. Safeguards will be needed against these risks. But we believe that any government that succeeds in implementing an intelligently-designed intervention to draw on this huge, under-utilized resource can have a big, positive impact on the economy 12 .

This is just one idea. We must innovate in different ways to survive the crisis and then have the ability to navigate the new world that will emerge, hopefully in the not too distant future.

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The World in Crisis: Government Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Insights from

Gaurav Chiplunkar

Michael blanding.

When the coronavirus was declared a pandemic last March, countries had to grapple with fraught decisions about how to best promote public health and whether to take steps to close down economic activity. Some succeeded better than others at getting the virus under control. A year later, some countries have virtually eradicated the virus, while others are looking at higher levels than ever.

For political economists, those responses provide a real-time experiment to examine longstanding questions about what kind of government best deals with disaster. “There has been a lot of debate and discussion about the types of political or social institutions that matter when it comes to confronting massive problems like this pandemic,” says Darden Professor Gaurav Chiplunkar, “and whether a country’s response varies depending on the institutions within it.”

In a new paper, “Political Institutions and Policy Reponses During a Crisis,” co-written with Sabyasachi Das at Ashoka University, Chiplunkar finds that the answer to that question is yes, the response is connected to the type of government and its institutions. The paper looks at a variety of factors, including the strength of a country’s democracy, freedom of its press and trust in its government, to investigate how those factors affect a country’s COVID-19 response.

The researchers found that when it comes to a crisis, not all institutions are created equal.

Closure and Health Policies

To judge countries’ responses, Chiplunkar and Das used a report by Oxford University that divided governments’ responses into categories: closure policies, such as shutting down schools and banning travel, or health policies, such as mandating masks or educating citizens about hand-washing and contact tracing. For each category, the report created an index to measure a country’s response, which the researchers were then able to use to compare countries’ institutions.

First, they looked at the difference in response between autocratic and democratic countries. They found that autocratic countries are more likely to have stringent policies in general: Even before the pandemic hit, autocracies rated some 25–30 percent higher on both health and containment indices as compared to democracies. And while both democracies and autocracies were swift to respond to the pandemic, the latter not only catch up on containment, but in fact surpass autocracies in health policies within a week or two of the first reported case. Democracies eventually rate about 35 percent higher on health policies, implying that democratic governments are better able to implement new policies in response to a crisis.

Effects of Leaders’ Tenures and Victories

Chiplunkar and Das further drilled down to examine other factors in a democracy that might affect the strength of the response, including whether a country has a presidential or parliamentary system, the size of a leader’s victory in the most recent election and how much time in office that leader had left. They found that all else being equal, both presidential and parliamentary systems performed similarly. But notably, leaders who won by larger margins or had more time left in office mounted more vigorous responses, especially with health policies such as contract tracing and awareness campaigns.

Chiplunkar speculates that having won a position in greater numbers made leaders feel more empowered, while having more time in office would give a feeling of greater responsibility, as they would more directly bear the consequences of the recovery.

“Those leaders may take steps more seriously because they have a greater incentive to do so,” he explains. Even in those cases, however, only health policies were stronger; those policies, Chiplunkar says, may be easier to implement than closures that shut down the economy.

Impact of a Free Press and Trust in the Government

The researchers next looked at the effects of a free press on COVID-19 response. Using measures on press freedom created by Reporters Without Borders, they found that countries in the upper half (above-median) of media freedom responded more aggressively on health policies following the onset of the pandemic. “Media plays a big role in collecting and disseminating information, which is important for health policies,” Chiplunkar says. The press might, for example, report where hot spots and outbreaks are occurring, pressuring the government to improve its response. While a more open press did not immediately affect the nature of response in containment policies, the researchers found that countries with a more free press (above-median measure of press freedom) do have relatively larger increase in containment policies after four to six weeks after the first COVID-19 case.

The most significant factor that Chiplunkar and Das found affecting containment policies was trust in government and its leader. Countries in which citizens reported more trust had stricter containment policies and better health policies after the first cases of the virus hit. Those in which people supported their leader’s independence to pursue their own policies also saw stricter containment policies, implying that in both cases citizens were more likely to follow their government’s lead and accept the imposition of government closures.

Institutions of Democracy

Taken as a whole, Chiplunkar says, the findings show that the strength of democratic institutions dramatically affect a country’s ability to respond to a crisis. “It turns out institutions matter a lot, especially in a pandemic situation,” Chiplunkar says. “Therefore, it’s important to think seriously about how these institutions are developed.” He was particularly surprised, he says, at how much trust in government institutions seemed to matter in creating an aggressive response. “That’s important because in a lot of places around the world, people are losing trust in the institutions of democracy,” Chiplunkar says, “as we’ve seen in U.S. elections.” Any efforts that could help restore that trust in democracy and media, he says, could help both the U.S. and other countries better prepare themselves for the next crisis and ensure they take the most appropriate responses when it occurs.

Gaurav Chiplunkar co-authored “Political Institutions and Policy Responses During a Crisis” with Sabyasachi Das of Ashoka University.

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Assistant Professor Gaurav Chiplunkar is in the Global Economies and Markets area. His research interests are at the intersection of development and labor economics and examines on the one hand, how large industrial policies affect firm behavior and on the other, how frictions in the labor market constrain job search, recruitment and hiring practices by workers and firms. He also studies how policy reforms and new technologies can help mitigate these frictions.

Ph.D. in Economics, Yale.

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How Governments Respond to Pandemics Like the Coronavirus

Sir Richard J. Evans, the provost of Gresham College, in London, is one the preëminent scholars of the Third Reich and modern Germany. Best known for his trilogy about Hitler and the Second World War, Evans has also extended his scholarship to numerous other areas, including pandemics. In 1987, he published “ Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (1830-1910) .” More recently, he gave a series of lectures at Gresham College titled “The Great Plagues: Epidemics in History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day.”

I recently spoke by phone with Evans in the hope of bringing some historical perspective to the coronavirus pandemic —in particular, to understand how leaders throughout history, including those with authoritarian leanings, have reacted to health emergencies. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how new technologies, from the railways to modern medicine, have shaped outbreaks, the different ways in which the United Kingdom and the United States have responded to the coronavirus, and why, even under different forms of government, “it’s the epidemic that’s calling the shots.”

What is your biggest takeaway when you consider how epidemics have shaped human history?

Human society has always been subject to major epidemics, and has dealt with them in quite similar ways over the centuries, even over the millennia. Of course, human society itself has also changed the way in which epidemics work. William H. McNeill, the great world historian, wrote a book called “ Plagues and Peoples ,” where he made a powerful argument for the impact of plagues upon human society. Take the Black Death , for example, in 1349, which killed maybe half the population in Europe. The economic effects were absolutely profound, when you think of the labor shortage, for example—too few people to work the fields—and the change in social relations and social structures.

But I think it’s also a two-way process. For example, in the Middle Ages or even in the late Roman Empire, plague spread fairly slowly, and you could deal with it by quarantine, unless societies weren’t well organized enough to do that. Then you got a big acceleration in the nineteenth century that comes with the railways. Cholera was a disease that hadn’t been known outside northeast India, but the British Empire, conquering North India, opened up trade routes. Railways spread the cholera very rapidly when it got to Europe. Steamships across the Atlantic, and of course, industrialization, with massive overcrowding and poverty, made it much easier to spread it in cities and towns. It is a two-way process. That’s first thing that occurs to me.

What was it about Hamburg that made you want to study that city, and why did you think that case study was so interesting or important?

Well, it’s the only city in western Central Europe that had a large-scale cholera epidemic in 1892. It’s more or less vanished from most of Europe, apart from tsarist Russia, long before that stage. There isn’t an epidemic in Great Britain, for example, after 1866, and so I wanted to know why this one occurred so late, and why is it so bad—I mean, ten thousand deaths in about six weeks. That’s what really made me look at it.

Also, I hesitate to do this, but let me quote Lenin, who says that there are certain events that open like a flash of lightning across a landscape. They make you see all kinds of things that you wouldn’t otherwise see. Everybody who lived through the cholera epidemic in 1892 in Hamburg and wrote letters or diaries or newspapers or whatever—they all wrote about it. The source material is fantastic. It can enable you to see the whole structure of the city and the nature of politics and society. Then it’s just in the statistical age, so you’ve got a lot of very good statistics that you can use to look at things like social distribution of disease, for example.

Then there’s a bigger question, which is that Hamburg, of course, was the second city in Germany. It was a major seaport, one of the biggest in the world. It was an autonomous city-state within the German Empire, and it ran its own affairs. It was run by merchants, who suppressed the news of the arrival of the disease from Russia, because they thought that quarantines would be imposed and that would damage trade.

I think we can see some parallels there in the present day. The coronavirus began in China, and initially China’s authorities tried to suppress the news. When it got out and they couldn’t contain it anymore, then they changed their course. You can look at the way in which society interacts with epidemic diseases and you can see certain similarities across the centuries.

Do you see differences across the centuries, too? Do you think people have gotten smarter about these things, or is human nature just what it is?

There are differences. First of all, medical science has got a lot better at identifying disease and a lot better at developing preventive measures. We are confidently expecting, in eighteen months or so, a vaccine for the coronavirus . Well, in the nineteenth century and before, medical science had very little idea of what caused disease, and for a very long time it was thought, for example, that cholera was caused by a miasma or a kind of invisible gas, rising from the ground and poisoning people.

It was only the development of germ theory by Pasteur and Koch, in the late nineteenth century, that made people realize that it was spread by a bacillus. Because of the development of the microscope, you could see these different organisms. It’s different from a virus, and in some ways you combat it by acid and disinfection, but, in particular, by clean water. Cholera is carried in water, and so if you can get clean water, filtrated water, purified water, then people can use that and will not get infected. Also, hygienic measures are somewhat similar to today. Again, washing your hands, particularly after you go to the bathroom, was a very big way of preventing the transmission of cholera, because it’s a disease of the digestive tract.

One difference is that, in the nineteenth century, people had all kinds of theories about how diseases spread, but it’s only in our own time that the science has become sophisticated and precise enough to pin it down and to develop, in an astonishingly short time, a preventive measure. There was no known cure for cholera or bubonic plague or any major disease, really, for a very, very long time, not really till the twentieth century. The second major difference is very striking. It’s what some have called the medicalization of society. If you look at cholera in the nineteenth century, whether it’s in Britain in 1832 or in Naples in 1884 or in many other countries when it arrived, the authorities tried to impose quarantines, isolation, and, later on in the nineteenth century, disinfection and so on. There were riots because people objected to the state interfering this way. Now we’re clamoring for preventive measures, so we’re clamoring for the state to intervene to try and control the disease. We accept medical science in a way that it was not accepted at a popular level in the nineteenth century. I think that’s very good, that we do now listen to the medics more than people did in the nineteenth century. Then, of course, in the nineteenth century, medicine, as I said, was not very effective at killing disease, and there was a lot of confusion about what caused it.

What about the ways in which pandemics have tended to impact politics and political structures? Do you think that there are common themes there?

There most certainly are, yes. On political structures, epidemics do undermine the legitimacy of governance and administration if it does too little to deal with a disease, or if it tries to suppress it in particular. I think inevitably it causes a crisis in government. A large part of that is economic. Major epidemics bring economies to a halt, and you can see that. I already mentioned the Black Death. If you look at cholera, particularly in Hamburg in 1892, essentially, because the merchant administration of the city tried to suppress the disease and suppress news of the disease, and failed to deal with it adequately, the government in Berlin just sent in Robert Koch, the bacteriologist, with a team, and they essentially took over the administration of the city. I think you can see that that led to really quite major changes in the way the city was run after that. It can cause a major crisis. Of course, in terms of the economy, it led to huge deficits in government revenues, and also caused severe damage to trade for several months before it recovered.

What about governments trying to use crises to accomplish their own ends, or political leaders trying to do so? Is that something that you’ve seen or noticed throughout history?

Well, it’s interesting. When cholera reached Prussia, in the eighteen-thirties, I came across in the archives a wonderful notice printed by the Prussian state, where it basically told people that what you had to do is trust in the authorities and obey what the authorities say. You’re not supposed to question government measures, and then trust in God. I think also there’s a major difference in terms of religion. I mean, Europe, at any rate, right up until the late nineteenth century, is a religious society, so people reacted by praying, not really doing any good in the short term.

Governments using disease, well, it’s more actually popular reactions to disease, popular protest. There’s a very good example very recently in Haiti, where cholera broke out in this series of disasters just a few years ago, an earthquake, a hurricane, and then cholera. The state was extremely weak, and people blamed cholera on the Nepalese United Nations troops who’d arrived there, and blamed them quite correctly. There were riots against the United Nations troops and, of course, protests against the government. I think it’s less common for governments to use epidemics for their own purposes. They’re reacting all the time, rather than acting.

It’s interesting that you have all these governments around the world right now that people have termed authoritarian or autocratic or autocratic-leaning. Putting aside China for a minute and just looking at the U.K. and the United States, with leaders who at least have impulses of that sort , they nevertheless seem entirely reactive rather than proactive in the measures they’re taking.

There are interesting differences in the way these various countries have dealt with this. I think the U.K.’s response is very much in the British tradition of volunteerism, liberalism, the laissez-faire state. Britain has been much slower to introduce major regulation and major intervention by the state. It’s tended more, up to now, to rely on voluntary action by people.

If you happen to look at states with a much stronger state presence in society in Continental Europe, like France and Italy or Spain, there’s much more enforcement of government measures—isolation enforced by the police, for example. I think that’s a major difference in the traditions and then the political culture of different societies.

When you were studying twentieth-century history and especially twentieth-century fascism and authoritarianism, were there examples of big health outbreaks, and how were those dealt with?

No, sorry. I don’t think there were, no.

That’s an acceptable answer.

Maybe they were lucky. I don’t know. I’m not sure that, in the end, there are big differences between authoritarian and liberal states or democratic states in the way they react to a major epidemic. It demands very major government intervention, whatever kind of government or whatever kind of state you have, whatever kind of political party is in power. In a way, it’s the epidemic that’s calling the shots. In Britain, there’s been massive public pressure for government to intervene in a more authoritarian way in society, in shaping public reactions and shaping public behavior. In the end, it may be easier for a regime like China to impose regulations and restrictions. Then if you look at some of the other societies that have been relatively successful in combating coronavirus—take South Korea. That is a democratic state, and yet that’s been successful, too.

You were talking about the differences between the U.K. and the U.S., which certainly have manifested themselves early on, but it’s very possible that, in a month’s time, everyone will be trying to be doing the same thing, putting the same Band-Aids on the same overwhelming problem.

Well, that does depend. When you get to a later stage of the epidemic, it does become very important what kind of health-care system you have. The National Health Service in the U.K. will be under tremendous strain, but I think it’s probably better equipped to cope than the health service in the U.S. , such as it is.

To return to Hamburg for a minute, can you talk more about how things changed once they finally came out of this cholera epidemic? I know your book goes to about 1910, but what by the end had you seen change, and how was society different?

I think Hamburg was very unusual in imperial Germany, because it was regarded as kind of an English city. It was very Anglophile. That’s one of the things that characterized that city, that it had this very laissez-faire attitude toward administration, toward society and politics, and then that changed. It became more what you might call Prussian. It became more top-down, more authoritarian in the way they organized things.

Also, there’s a great loss of legitimacy by the city fathers. That was reflected in the growth of popularity of the Socialists in Hamburg, the Social Democrats. The city administration in some ways became less liberal, and revised the voting rights to take voting rights away from the working classes to protect its own rule. They got more integrated into imperial Germany. I think it became more German, if you like, and then that had a lot of implications. I think it’s difficult to connect that with the rise of National Socialism, which is relatively weak in Hamburg in electoral terms in the nineteen-twenties.

So to summarize some of what you are saying, you see more continuities than differences in how states respond, even though we’re in a new age with modern medicine and modern communication and we can see what’s going on so much more quickly and so on. Is that accurate?

Yeah, it is accurate. I mean, as I said, certainly common features emerge. For example, in terms of information being made available, again, there have been a lot of complaints in the U.K. that not enough information has been made available to people. That’s fairly standard across epidemics in history.

In terms of more differences, you can also look at the effects of the more intensive and faster communication across the globe. Trade has always played a role in spreading disease, and the incredible rapidity with which coronavirus has spread across the world is, in part, a reflection of the way in which we’re all bound together, in particular by air travel. You can look back then to the nineteenth century and see how the spread of the disease was sped up by the introduction of railways. Before that, you’ve got sailing ships. They move relatively slowly, but you can see how the bubonic plague was spread across the Mediterranean by shipping and merchants and so on.

Richard, thank you for this. I hear you’re coughing now, so I hope you stay inside.

I need a glass of water. It’s talking too much, Isaac.

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I want to lead, i want to learn, register for the newsletter, resource library, budget, deficits, and debt, demographics, defense and national security, other programs, retirement security, taxes and revenues, infographics, you are here, here’s everything the federal government has done to respond to the coronavirus so far.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a severe public health crisis as well as substantial economic disruption for every American. So far, lawmakers have enacted six major bills, costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Below is a recap of that legislation.

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Total coronavirus legislation endacted thus far.

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The Latest Round of Legislation

The American Rescue Plan , which was enacted on March 11, 2021, provides an additional $1.9 trillion of federal relief in a variety of areas. Some of the key provisions in that bill include:

Direct payments to individuals ($411 billion). Payments of $1,400 will be sent to individual taxpayers earning up to $75,000 ($2,800 for married couples earning up to $150,000), plus an additional $1,400 per qualified child. The payment will phase out for incomes up to $80,000 ($160,000 for married couples).
Direct aid to state, local, and tribal governments ($362 billion). The bill includes additional support to such governments to help them respond to the pandemic.
Extension of unemployment benefits ($203 billion). The unemployment programs currently in place, including the additional $300 weekly unemployment benefit, will be extended through September 6, 2021.
Tax incentives ($176 billion). The legislation significantly enhances existing tax credits, mostly for one year. The Child Tax Credit will increase from $2,000 per child to $3,000 ($3,600 for children under 6) and the maximum benefit for childless households under the Earned Income Tax Credit will grow from $543 to $1,502 and be extended so more individuals can claim the benefit. Other tax credits, such as the Employee Retention Credit, are also extended or enhanced.
Health-specific measures ($174 billion). The new bill provides funding for vaccine distribution, COVID-19 testing, contact tracing, and other public health measures. It also includes provisions to lower healthcare premiums and expand coverage for certain workers.
Educational support ($170 billion). The majority of such support is to help K-12 schools safely reopen; colleges and other higher-education institutions will also receive funding.
Other Programs ($301 Billion). The legislation also includes funding for small businesses, emergency rental assistance, mortgage assistance, and relief to prevent homelessness.

Previous Relief Bills

The five bills enacted previous to the American Rescue Plan are summarized below.

Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act

As an initial response, policymakers enacted legislation in early March, 2020 that provided $8.3 billion in emergency funding for public health agencies and coronavirus vaccine research. That bill appropriated $7.8 billion in discretionary funding to federal, state, and local health agencies and authorized $500 million in mandatory spending through a change in Medicare.

Families First Coronavirus Response Act

On March 18, 2020 the Families First Coronavirus Response Act was enacted to provide economic support to those in need. That legislation, totaling $192 billion, included a number of key components, including:

Enhancing unemployment insurance benefits
Increasing federal Medicaid and food-security spending
Requiring certain employers to provide paid sick leave as well as family and medical leave (and expanding tax credits for those employers to offset the cost of providing such leave)
Providing free coverage for coronavirus testing under government health programs

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act

As a follow-up, lawmakers enacted the CARES Act , a relief package of around $2 trillion , on March 27 to address the near-term economic impact the virus is having on families and businesses. Some of the key items in the legislation include:

Financial Assistance to Large Companies and Governments ($500 billion). Such funding will be used to assist companies that are critical to national security and distressed sectors of the economy. Of the total sum, about $450 billion will support loans to businesses, states, and municipalities through a new Federal Reserve lending facility. That support is not expected to increase federal deficits.
Economic support for small businesses ($380 billion). That support was largely for the creation of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) , which allocated $349 billion in funding through the CARES Act to offer as loans to small businesses to help them avoid laying off their workers. Additionally, portions of the loans spent on payroll, rent, or utilities are eligible for forgiveness.
Direct payments to taxpayers ($290 billion). Taxpayers with annual incomes up to $75,000 (or $150,000 for married couples) received payments of $1,200; that payment amount gradually phased out for higher income earners with a cap at an annual salary of $99,000 (or $198,000 for married couples). Families also received an additional $500 per qualifying child. (See how taxpayers spent the first round of checks and what the economic effects were.)
Further expansion of unemployment benefits ($270 billion). Such benefits were significantly expanded under the legislation — extending unemployment insurance by 13 weeks, boosting benefits by up to $600 per week for four months, and expanding eligibility requirements to include more categories of workers.
Federal aid to hospital and healthcare providers ($150 billion). To help hospitals, community health centers, and other healthcare providers prepare for and respond to the pandemic.
Various tax incentives. Businesses were allowed to defer payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare. A number of other tax benefits were also be provided; the largest effect stemmed from the ability of individual taxpayers to use business losses in recent years to offset nonbusiness income.

Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act

On April 24, 2020 policymakers enacted the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act . That bill, totaling $483 billion, provided an additional $383 billion in economic support for small businesses ($321 billion to replenish the PPP, $60 billion for emergency lending for small businesses, and $2 billion for salaries and expenses to administer such programs), another $75 billion in funding for hospitals, and about $25 billion to fund more testing for the pandemic.

Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021

The Consolidated Appropriations Act, enacted on December 27, 2020, included $868 billion of federal support to help mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are the components of that relief package:

Aid to small businesses ($302 billion) . The CARES Act created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provided loans to small businesses that were impacted by the broad economic shutdowns that were meant to mitigate the spread of the pandemic. This package allowed small businesses to receive a second round of PPP loans and ensured that such assistance was not be taxed. This category also includes Economic Injury Disaster Loan advances and emergency grants to entertainment venues.
Direct payments to individuals ($164 billion) . Individuals making up to $75,000 per year received a payment of $600, with an additional $600 for each dependent child. All payments phase out at higher incomes. ( See how Americans spent the last round of stimulus checks .)
Increased unemployment benefits ($119 billion) . The earlier relief legislation provided several enhancements to unemployment insurance benefits that were ultimately allowed to expire. This package restored those enhancements, albeit at more modest levels. It added $300 per week to unemployment benefits, continued “gig” worker eligibility for unemployment benefits, and lengthened the maximum period that a worker could collect unemployment to 50 weeks.
Aid for schools ($82 billion) . About two-thirds of the total amount was for grants to public K-12 schools, and most of the remainder was for grants to higher education.
Health-specific measures ($78 billion) . Included in this category is $29 billion designated for the procurement and distribution of coronavirus vaccines and treatments and $22 billion for testing, tracing, and mitigation of coronavirus. An additional $14 billion supported healthcare providers and bolstered mental health services, and the National Institutes of Health received $1 billion to engage in further coronavirus research.
Other measures ($123 billion) . The legislation also included funding for transportation, increased food stamp benefits, additional childcare assistance, rental assistance, and other programs.

Learn More: Understanding the Coronavirus Crisis: Key Fiscal and Economic Indicators

Image credit: Photo by Cindy Ord / Getty Images

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Coronavirus Pandemic

Efficiency in the governance of the Covid-19 pandemic: political and territorial factors

Pedro-José Martínez-Córdoba ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5745-5709 1 ,
Bernardino Benito 1 &
Isabel-María García-Sánchez 2

Globalization and Health volume 17 , Article number: 113 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The pandemic generated by Covid-19 has changed the way of life of citizens around the world in a short time, affecting all areas of society directly or indirectly, which is facing a global health crisis with different national responses implemented by governments. Several months into the pandemic, the first after-effects of Covid-19 are beginning to be felt by citizens, who are questioning the management carried out so far. In order to improve the performance of governmental decisions to reduce the impact of the pandemic during the coming months, we calculated the levels of efficiency in the management of health resources. In addition, we identify some country characteristics that may condition efficient management.

We obtained significant differences according to the geographical location of the country, with European and American countries being less efficient than Asian and African countries. Likewise, we can affirm that greater freedom of expression, a higher median age and an unstable economy and labor market reduce efficiency. However, female leadership of the government and greater compliance with the rule of law offer more efficient management, as do countries that derive more revenues from tourism.

Conclusions

Introduction

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, better known as Covid-19, to be a pandemic. Since then, several months later and with more than 100 million people infected and 2,2 million dead (by early February 2021), the world and its inhabitants have experienced events unusual for their time. With the fear of a new economic recession and its implications, in addition to the foreseeable waves of infected people, an efficient management is required, capable of dealing with everything that exists and is about to arrive.

The characteristics of the Covid-19 pandemic, due to its severity, immediacy and complexity, have highlighted the weaknesses of governments in solving this crisis. Zoonotic diseases (such as that caused by Covid-19) represent a threat to life in society, with the possibility of causing a serious disruption to the world economy, a global event whose response is national and depends on the behavior patterns of citizens.

The socio-economic effects of Covid-19 are many and diverse, individually and collectively damaging people and the economy, and appropriate management is needed to resolve this situation [ 34 ]. Covid-19 is a challenge in terms of public health that affects all areas of life, where public managers responsible for solving this crisis must manage carefully and proactively the available resources in order to avoid risks and reduce the impact of the pandemic.

Effective management, able to take decisive action based on scientific knowledge rather than political opportunity, can explain much of the success of the response to Covid-19. Coordination, resource availability and political accountability can contribute to this goal, although many of the decisions adopted during the current pandemic have focused on political and economic considerations, and have left aside public health aspects [ 20 ].

In this sense, it is difficult to understand the different responses that governments have adopted to the same situation. Indeed, questions related to the governance of the pandemic arise, such as: Which territories have better managed health resources? Does political ideology influence the management of the pandemic? Has the governance of the pandemic been efficient? Thus, we propose three dimensions - Territory, Politics and Governance - interrelated with the efficient management of the pandemic [ 16 ], which may explain the differences between countries.

This research aims to understand the efficiency in the management of health resources to cope with the pandemic. Furthermore, we identify the impact of the country’s characteristics (territorial, political, governance, sociodemographic and economic) that can condition the transmission of the virus, and consequently efficient management. Taking into account the volatility of the pandemic, the availability of information and the methodological changes that make it difficult to obtain data, we conducted an analysis that allows us to obtain the levels of efficiency for 155 countries along with results capable of contributing to improving the management of the pandemic over the coming months and years.

Theoretical framework

The need to find solutions to an unusual situation that affects all aspects of life has served to unite academia around Covid-19. In fact, as of January 1, 2021, in the main collection of the Web of Science we located 63,708 results when searching for the term “Covid-19”, among which 32,782 are articles, which shows the relevance of the problem in just a few months. We reviewed some publications related to the management of Covid-19 and its impact on social, economic, and political areas. Below we highlight the most relevant aspects related to policy, pandemic governance and territory, as well as research related to efficiency in health management.

Literature in times of pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown how a health crisis can cause unprecedented damage worldwide. Other tragic events such as climate change or localized catastrophes allow for a greater response capacity, while the dimensions of this pandemic are yet to be discovered [ 21 ]. Some effects are already visible with the paralysis of economic activity, which represents a serious risk to the general and socioeconomic well-being of people [ 33 ].

The trade-off between economics and health has led to an important debate on how to take the most effective measures to curb the impact of the pandemic. The intensity and speed of the economic shock, highly visible in the loss of employment, and the severity of the economic contraction in relation to the spread of the virus have been the first consequences. All this has led to economic uncertainty never before seen on a global scale, which will make a rapid and complete recovery difficult [ 2 ].

Thus, differences in economic forecasts are related to the response capacity implemented by governments, as well as their exposure to international transmission of the virus, especially those most dependent on tourism. It is expected that governments with better performance in managing the crisis will also do so in economic terms, i.e., good health management of the pandemic is profitable for the country’s society and economy [ 30 ].

In this regard, the speed and nature of post-Covid-19 economic recovery will be hampered by government actions to curb the pandemic, such as numerous disruptions in supply chains as a result of confinement and the reduction in demand due to decreased activity to avoid contracting the disease [ 44 ]. Consequently, it is necessary to diversify economic activities and reduce dependence on specific sectors to mitigate the impact of similar situations that may occur in the near future; in addition, investment in health infrastructure to deal with infectious diseases and progress in information and communication technologies is needed if pre-pandemic levels of growth and well-being are to be achieved [ 35 ].

The measures implemented to halt the spread of the virus have not had the same result in all countries [ 5 ], nor even within the same territory. The economic conditions of the population to cope with the health measures represent a relevant difference. Thus, citizens with inadequate housing, high rates of poverty or unemployment have a higher risk of death from Covid-19, even among the youngest population [ 22 ]. In the case of Italy, the first Western country to be severely punished by the pandemic, the reduction of mobility has been transcendental in the impact of the pandemic, with citizens with higher economic levels being more compliant, as they do not have to leave their homes to obtain resources [ 6 ].

In addition, public leadership, not only political but also health-related, is presented as a key element in improving the management of the pandemic [ 19 ]. Leaders must be institutionally prepared for change and open to public-private collaboration to improve health management. These changes must be coupled with greater transparency in public health decisions, ensuring that science is not overridden by ideology, even when politically motivated [ 38 ]. In this sense, countries led by women tend to listen to and trust more the recommendations of science. Traditionally female characteristics, such as empathy, compassion and caring, have led to more effective responses to Covid-19 [ 37 ], improving governance in times of the pandemic.

In democratic systems, government legitimacy is an indispensable condition for maintaining political capacity and credibility. In times of crisis, citizens rely on government for credible information to guide their individual behavior [ 25 ]. Although ideological differences during the pandemic months have not had a significant impact on policy decisions, an early response has great advantages over a strict delay, i.e., early and flexible actions to contain the virus have better results than late and severe ones [ 40 ].

Notwithstanding the above, in some prominent countries the implementation of measures has been conditioned by the ideology of the rulers. For example, in the United States, Republicans are not as keen on following orders of social distancing as Democrats, the latter being more inclined to maintain recommended distances for the population and to comply with mobility restrictions [ 36 ]. In the case of Spain, and after the first wave of contagion, citizens are directing their preferences towards technocratic governments with strong leadership, given that the diversity of political opinions has not translated into the containment of the pandemic [ 3 ].

Governance of pandemics

The public sector faces complex problems in an increasingly turbulent social environment, having to manage uncertain and unpredictable scenarios. At the same time, it tries to solve these problems under pressure and without sufficient knowledge of their cause and effect. This requires political leaders to improve their responsiveness by designing, combining and executing sound governance strategies [ 4 ].

One of these problems has to do with pandemic diseases, which are capable of undermining even the best pre-established plans, due to their unprecedented characteristics and divergent requirements for their solution, irrespective of each government’s forecasts. In this regard, governments face several important constraints in the governance of the pandemic, in particular with the uncertainty of citizens about the adverse consequences of the pandemic [ 10 ].

In this sense, the challenges posed by the governance of pandemics are not simply technical, but adequate government management must also take into account socio-political issues as well as the media projection of the events. A rational scientific approach to the management of pandemics is insufficient in the current socio-demographic and globalised context, and a socio-political mix of science, culture and public perceptions is needed for the development of public health policies [ 7 ]. Effective pandemic management requires an adaptive (taking into account the unprecedented character of the events) learning approach by governments, as well as a combination of knowledge of public health, epidemiology and socio-political factors, where trust in institutions, leadership or governance can be key elements [ 24 ].

Thus, the exercise of adequate governance can determine the outcomes of pandemic disease management. In the case of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), it has been shown that inadequate governance is associated with a higher prevalence of the disease, while it has been found that as governance improves, fewer women die in childbirth, there are more doctors per inhabitant, there is better access to clean water and life expectancy increases [ 32 ]. Furthermore, citizens’ trust in government, as well as compliance with imposed rules and acceptance of new norms and values, is fundamental to the implementation of valid pandemic governance solutions, since government recommendations will be subject to frequent reformulations that may test the population’s understanding and comprehension [ 4 ].

Predictive pandemic governance models provide robust and reliable evidence for decision-making. It is easy to think, therefore, that such models yield firm and reliable evidence, although during the swine flu pandemic in 2009, the weakness of the evidence formulated in the prediction was noted. Indeed, as time passed and cases were reported, the following questions were asked: Was a pandemic alert necessary? Why did governments spend a significant amount of money on vaccines and antiviral stockpiles that were never used and have now expired? [ 31 ]. Nevertheless, predictive models must be seen as a form of technical rationality in the broader context of governance [ 14 ]. Hence the timeliness of our study, in the sense that the results obtained can help governments in their investment decisions in the face of possible health pandemics that are likely to occur in the future.

Another important aspect of improving the speed and efficiency of pandemic governance is to learn from the past and adapt institutions to the new reality. A good example of this is the case of South Korea in the management of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2015, where after overcoming the pandemic they implemented new policies and institutional changes in anticipation of future pandemics, which has favoured the governance of the new coronavirus (Covid-19) with the early introduction of effective measures [ 38 ].

The Covid-19 pandemic became relevant in China in early 2020, and in March 2020 the world was confined without knowing how to deal with an unprecedented situation that was spreading out of control. It has been shown that the risk posed by lax health regulation in one locality can easily and quickly lead to a global health crisis (as has happened), and it is necessary to identify the geographical areas where the convergence of risk factors is most intense [ 9 ].

On the other hand, the supervening difficulties caused by a pandemic make it necessary to reflect on the appropriateness of whether public health governance and decision-making should be elevated to the global level. Subsidiarity provides a means in this regard to consider whether these public powers should be reallocated, even temporarily, although public health and economics are fundamental values within each State [ 15 ]. Subsidiarity is understood as the appropriate geographical distribution of power, arguing that powers should rest at the lowest possible level, unless it is more effective to allocate them at a higher level.

Efficient health management

The limited economic resources of the public sector, together with the citizens’ demands for quality health care, force politicians to innovate in management to be more efficient. From this point of view, traditional management has been compared to New Public Management , without finding significant differences. However, numerous studies have shown greater efficiency in public health management than in private management [ 27 ]. For example, this is the case in Spain [ 1 ] or Germany, where privately owned healthcare centers show lower levels of efficiency, explained in part by a longer stay in these centers than in the public ones [ 26 ].

On the other hand, Hafidz et al. [ 23 ] suggest a series of recommendations to politicians with the aim of improving health services on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side, it would be appropriate to optimize the workforce and the infrastructure, increase the quality of service and develop financial strategies; while on the demand side, financial barriers should be minimized, accessibility to health services should be increased and citizens’ health habits should be changed. In addition, a system of hospital costs that allows an exhaustive control would mean taking more efficient decisions, thus improving the performance in health management [ 18 ]. However, in order to analyze health management in terms of efficiency, it is necessary to include exogenous factors that can strongly condition the provision of the service [ 11 ].

The speed and volatility of the pandemic has meant a complicated statistical process to homogenize data and provide valid and reliable information is needed. In order to analyze the level of efficiency in the management of the pandemic, it is necessary to have a certain number of comparable observations. The data offered by international organizations (World Bank, WHO, International Monetary Fund (IMF)) regarding the 237 countries of the world, are considered the most appropriate sources of information today. In addition, since the beginning of the pandemic, management has been led by national governments, which set the guidelines and standardize decisions at the country level. Therefore, the most appropriate units of analysis are the countries, although we have had to select those that report on the variables needed to calculate efficiency (see Table 1 ). Thus, once the countries with incomplete or erroneous data have been filtered out, the final sample was a set of 155 countries. Figures 1 and 2 show the countries included in the sample, with the exclusion of a small group that did not adequately report the necessary variables.

Graphic representation of efficiency levels

Graphic representation of the output Cases confirmed

The research context determines the most appropriate technique for measuring efficiency. In our case, the characteristics of the public sector make it necessary to select a method that easily manages the production function and does not require data on the price of inputs or outputs, which is difficult to obtain in public services [ 41 ]. Among the most commonly used techniques, non-parametric (Data Envelopment Analysis -DEA, Free Disposable Hull and Order-m) and parametric (Stochastic Frontier Analysis) methods are the most used, with DEA being the most appropriate for calculating efficiency in the public sector environment, and more specifically in health care [ 23 , 28 , 39 ]. The objective of DEA is to obtain a relative efficiency level by means of linear programming problems, forming a frontier (envelope) that incorporates all the efficient Decision-Making Units (DMUs) (best input-output ratio) and their linear combinations, while placing the rest of the DMUs with values lower than the unit as inefficient.

To calculate the levels of efficiency with DEA, the inputs and outputs must be selected, and these are will be determined by the research objective. In our case, to determine the efficiency of pandemic management, the inputs refer to the resources available to manage a health crisis of these characteristics, and the outputs to its direct consequences. Thus, following the most recent literature analyzing efficiency in the health sector [ 17 , 29 ], the selected inputs are the available physicians ( Physicians ) and nurses ( Nurses ), the number of hospital beds ( Hospital beds ) and the current expenditure on health care ( Health expenditure ), while the number of people infected by Covid-19 ( Cases confirmed ) and the number of deaths ( Death rate ) form the outputs. Table 1 explains each input and output in more detail, as well as the sources of information and descriptive statistics.

With the R-Studio software and the deaR package [ 8 ] we have obtained the efficiency levels for each country. DEA allows us to select the orientation of the model between input, when the objective is to minimize the resources employed (inputs) while maintaining constant the results (outputs), or output, when the aim is to maximize the results (outputs) while maintaining the resources (inputs). In our case, it could be interesting to minimize the vector of inputs ( Physicians , Nurses , Hospital beds and Health expenditure ) or to maximize the vector of outputs ( Cases confirmed and Death rate ). However, what we intend in our research is to design a model that allows us to maintain or increase the vector of inputs as far as possible and incorporate a vector of undesired outputs. Thus, we opt for the output orientation according to the model proposed by Seiford and Zhu [ 42 ], which reduces the undesired outputs. In addition, we selected variable returns to scale (VRS) due to the differences in the size of the DMUs, where different scales of production can be developed.

Environmental variables

Following the literature reviewed in the previous section (Theoretical framework), and in order to understand the characteristics of the countries that can influence the efficient management of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have selected variables representative of territory ( Europe , America , Asia and Africa ), politics ( Gender and Ideology ) and governance ( Voice and Rule of law ) of each country, as well as a set of control variables related to demographics ( Median age ) and economics ( GDP, Tourism and Unemployment ).

The variables Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa reflect the health regions established by the WHO. Gender represents the gender of the national government leader, which takes the value 1 if female and 0 for male. Ideology takes the value 1 for conservative rulers and 0 for progressive ones. Among the governance indicators we have selected those directly related to the management of the Covid-19 pandemic ( Voice and Rule of law ). Voice indicates freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of the media, and by choosing it we intend to show governments’ commitment to transparency. Rule of law reflects compliance and respect for established rules. Median age represents the median age of the population. GDP is the percentage of year-on-year change in constant prices of Gross Domestic Product for 2019. Tourism is the percentage of exports in goods and services that represent the income obtained from international visitors. Unemployment is the unemployment rate in 2019. Table 1 specifies in more detail these variables, their descriptive statistics and the sources of information.

Regression model

To determine the impact of environmental variables on efficiency levels, we estimated the following regression model:

where $ {\hat{\delta}}_i $ represents the level of efficiency for each country; α is the constant of the model; β j are the coefficients of each variable; Europe , Americas , Asia , Africa , Gender , Ideology , Voice , Rule of law , Median age , GDP , Tourism and Unemployment , are the environmental variables; and ε i is the term of error.

The level of efficiency obtained with DEA, defined in the interval [0–1], conditions us to a truncated regression model as the best option to test the impact of environmental variables in a second stage [ 43 ]. We used R-Studio software with the package truncreg , which estimates model (1) for truncated Gaussian variables by maximum likelihood [ 12 ]. In addition, to avoid possible biases in the efficiency calculation, the separability condition [ 13 ] between inputs-outputs and environmental variables was tested, and the independence of these was confirmed.

The correlation matrix between inputs-outputs and environmental variables (Table 2 ) shows the significance of some of these variables, without compromising the validity of the level of efficiency or the regression model (1). For example, the indissoluble link between Physicians and Nurses , who complement each other in the healthcare activity, is essential to respond to the pandemic. In the case of the environmental variables, the significance is centered on aspects related to the geographical situation of the country ( Europe , Americas , Asia and Africa ), which we regress alternatively to avoid perfect multicollinearity.

Moreover, there may be correlations between the governance variables chosen, given that in countries with a strong Rule of law , the freedoms of expression, participation and communication ( Voice ) will be respected to a greater extent. In any case, taking into account the results of the control variables (see Table 4 ), the significant correlations shown in Table 2 do not condition the regression model (1).

The efficiency levels are shown in Fig. 1 , where we observe a significant difference between regions ( Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa ). The countries of Europe and Americas obtain on average lower values compared to those of Asia and Africa (see Table 3 ). We found that the less efficient countries, which are represented with a lighter color in Fig. 1 , obtain a darker color in Fig. 2 . Thus, the countries of Europe and the Americas show a higher average incidence ( Cases confirmed ) than the countries of Asia and Africa (see Table 3 ).

If the countries of Europe and the Americas have more resources (inputs) for pandemic management (see Table 3 ), their results should be more favorable. If this is not the case, we confirm the inefficiency in the management of health resources by these countries. These data could be explained by the capacity and information acquired in recent decades in Asian countries, as a result of having effectively combated similar viruses (SARS and MERS-CoV). This is also the case in African countries, where they coexist with more uncontrolled diseases (Ebola and Malaria) that bestow on society a greater awareness of the extraordinary measures of health protection. Although the average efficiency of Africa is higher than that of Europe or Americas, some countries with economic and tourism solvency are below the average of the latter, as is the case of South Africa or Tunisia (0.7352 and 0.8093, respectively).

During the first weeks of the pandemic, political leaders in some countries such as the United States, Brazil and the United Kingdom denied the extent and consequences of the virus, implementing measures that favoured its spread. Thus, the efficiency levels obtained in these countries (0.8084; 0.7215; 0.6809, respectively) do not correspond to their economic, political and social characteristics. On the opposite side we find the Asian country where the virus originated (China), or those with more experience in pandemic management for having solved similar situations (South Korea), with very high levels of efficiency (0.9993; 0.9841, respectively). On the other hand, the arrival of Covid-19 in European countries such as Germany, France and Spain tested the response capacity of their governments, which tried to improve on the management carried out by the first western country affected by the pandemic (Italy); however, the results confirm that more and better can be done (0.7153; 0.7248; 0.7567; 0.6018, respectively).

The estimation of the regression model (1) provides information on the effect of environmental variables on efficiency levels (see Table 4 ). Taking into account the perfect multicollinearity that would exist if we regressed the variables Europe , Americas , Asia and Africa in the same model, we performed four regressions, alternatively omitting one of these variables and maintaining the rest (Full model), to secure more robust results. In addition, as a preliminary step to this complete model, we estimated the individual impact of the Territory, Politics and Governance variables on efficiency levels. These results allow us to know the relevance of each group of variables in the efficient management of the pandemic.

With respect to the geographical location of the country, the results of the regression model confirm the above. That is, countries located in Europe and the Americas show worse results in the efficiency of pandemic management than countries belonging to Asia and Africa . These results hold for the individual Territory estimate and for the Full model, so that the geographical impact of the country can be considered a relevant factor in the efficient management of the pandemic. There is a small deviation in the results when we estimate the model without the Asia variable, which appears to be less. These results should be interpreted with caution, knowing that the individual management of the pandemic by countries generates differences in the same geographical area.

Another relevant finding has been the effect of female leadership (Full model) on decision making during the pandemic ( Gender ). The qualities of women when facing risky situations, who show temperance and moderation in government actions, may be the cause of a more efficient management. With the available data, during the management of the pandemic we can affirm that countries led by women are more efficient than those led by men. However, there is still a gender gap in government leadership today, with only 10.32% of the countries in our sample being led by women. On the other hand, when faced with situations of these characteristics, governments have no margin for ideology , and are forced to implement technical and impartial decisions in favor of the common good. These political factors maintain their significance for both estimates (Politics and Full model).

Countries that are freer in the area of communication, expression or participation ( Voice ) will have citizens well informed and able to argue positions that diverge from those established by the government. Thus, political leaders should work more efficiently and effectively to gain the support of their citizens. However, the results indicate lower efficiency in pandemic management for countries with more Voice . In contrast, countries that are more respectful of their Rule of law achieve better results in the efficient management of the pandemic. Compliance with established regulations (home confinement, mobility restrictions, space capacity, among others) to curb the spread of the virus allows for the optimisation of available resources.

Focusing now on the control variables (demographics and economics), they maintain their significance and sign in all estimations, with the exception of the GDP variable, which loses its significance in the individual Politics and Governance estimation.

The virulence of the pandemic has been especially intense among the elderly ( Median population ) due to possible previous pathologies or a more deteriorated immune system. Thus, aging countries (older population) have needed more resources to deal with severe cases in this segment of the population, so limiting the response capacity of the health system. Consequently, an increase in the Median age implies a lower efficiency in the management of the pandemic, demonstrating that countries with an aging population have not been able to adapt their decisions to the peculiarities of their populations.

On the other hand, the intensity and speed with which events occurred during the first months of the pandemic, and which froze a large part of the productive activity for fear of health collapse, has caused an unprecedented shock to the economy. To this must be added the uncertainty generated in families, companies and governments by the lack of knowledge of the virus - a counterproductive factor for the economy. We might expect those economies that are stronger and more solvent, i.e., those that are better prepared to face contingencies of this magnitude, to manage the pandemic better. Indeed, the results confirm this point, with countries with more vulnerable economies (higher GDP variation) reducing efficiency levels.

Countries that receive more revenue from tourism activities ( Tourism ) improve their efficiency. We understand that these countries strive to offer a good image that is capable of continuing to attract a high number of visitors, so proper management of the pandemic will improve their prestige and maintain the economic activity associated with this sector.

The labor market situation ( Unemployment ) is a good example of how families and households are financially able to withstand crisis situations. In this sense, high unemployment rates reduce people’s autonomy, making them more vulnerable and dependent. Thus, countries with an unstable and poorly diversified labor market (higher unemployment rate) are less able to cope with the effects of the pandemic, and so efficiency deteriorates. This may condition management by governments, because not only the victims of Covid-19 should be attended to, but also those affected by the economic situation, which means diversifying efforts and reducing efficiency.

Conclusions and policy implications

Improving health management is a current priority for governments in view of the situation generated by Covid-19, which affects both people’s health and the economy. The policies implemented to solve this pandemic are many and varied, depending on the governments of each country, and although facing the same problem, the responses have been different. Taking into account the evolution of the pandemic 11 months later, we thought it necessary to evaluate the health management carried out so far in order to better respond to the foreseeable waves of contagion and their effects.

To this end, we calculated the levels of efficiency in the management of health resources and estimated the impact of Territory, Politics and Governance characteristics controlled by demographic and economic variables of the country. We use DEA as the most appropriate technique to obtain efficiency with undesirable outputs ( Cases confirmed and Death rate ). We found that the countries that use more resources in the health system obtain worse results in the management of the pandemic. In particular, European and American countries are less efficient than Asian and African countries.

Thus, we confirm that the geographical situation of the country (Territory) as relevant factor for efficient management of the pandemic. With respect to Politics, female leadership of the government seems to incorporate aspects in management that improve efficiency. The Governance represent a fundamental element in solving the health crisis, greater freedom of expression, communication and citizen participation, as well as poor compliance with the rule of law, will hinder the efficient management of the pandemic. On the other hand, we can state that aging populations, vulnerable economies and an unstable labour market before the pandemic reduce efficiency, while countries that obtain more revenues from international tourism will strive to show a solvent image, thus improving their efficiency. In contrast, the ideology of the government leader do not have a significant effect.

These results provide an opportunity for political leaders to reflect on their management during these months of the pandemic in order to identify mistakes and improve the implementation of effective measures. It has been shown that using more resources does not mean managing better; therefore, policymakers need to pay special attention to the use of resources, taking into account the budgetary constraints of the public sector. Moreover, a very important aspect of efficiency is to learn from the past and not to make the same mistakes. Thus, experience in the governance of pandemics is a key factor, with those countries that have managed similar circumstances in the past being the ones that have obtained the best economic and social results.

Finally, the limitations of the research are centered on the volatility of the pandemic and the inadequate information due to methodological differences in data collection. In the coming months and years, when more and better information becomes available, it will be possible to analyse the management of the pandemic in a broader perspective and to identify the causes and effects in each country. Until then, the results of this research offer an opportunity for policy makers to reflect on their management and to try to improve many aspects before it is too late.

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Published: 03 April 2020

Pandemics show us what government is for

Susan Erikson 1

Nature Human Behaviour volume 4 , pages 441–442 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Growth-at-any-cost economics has health costs, a reality the COVID-19 pandemic brings into sharp relief. Governments must manage the tension between economics and health, but they should not stray from their original mandate to protect people. Too much dependence on the private sector weakened pandemic response, argues Susan Erikson.

As a medical anthropologist who was in Sierra Leone when Ebola broke out in 2014, I am struck by the similarities between the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the West African Ebola outbreak. In both cases, denialism and an initial slow response proved deadly, albeit understandable: humans don’t tend to quickly embrace changes to their circumstances, no matter where they are in the world. Defiance of social-distancing and home-isolation imperatives is common. Citizens of wealthy countries now know the feeling of having to break home quarantine to find food or care for sick loved ones. Unexpected, though, are the similarities in an initial inability to protect healthcare personnel and provide essential health technologies during a pandemic. Nurses, doctors and paramedics lack personal protection equipment (PPE). Home health aides have no health insurance. Test kits are in short supply. The governments of some wealthy countries did not rapidly organize their engineers to build quick-setup diagnostic and treatment facilities, nor did they expeditiously direct manufacturers to ramp up the production of PPEs, test kits and ventilators. Inconsistent enactment and enforcement of laws against hoarding and supply profiteering prevail. Such tasks fall within the social contract governments have with their citizens, and the failure to swiftly fulfill those responsibilities has long been evidence of failed statehood. With COVID-19, we see how small-government ideologies leave too much health preparedness to ‘the market’, creating a perfect storm in rich countries too.

As COVID-19 forces national economies to slow to a near-halt and life is stripped down to its essentials, we see the purposes of government. At the time of writing (24 March), governments are shelling out money for stopgap funding to corporations, communities and individuals to break the financial freefall that happens when people comply with social distancing. But they will soon move out of the government-as-cash-machine stage of pandemic response. Many federal coffers will run short, and the kicker is that those shortfalls were created intentionally. In recent decades, the tax base in many countries has declined precipitously relative to the country’s wealth. Many rich citizens and corporations now pay a smaller percentage of their incomes than their fellow citizens in the middle and working classes. Government laboratories studying infectious disease were shut or short-funded when they could not show rapid return on investment. Just-in-time supply systems, in which companies deliberately avoid stockpiling and order inventory on an as-needed basis, were imposed on societal sectors, including health.

The idea that government is a big bungler began in the 1970s, took hold in the 1980s, and has since only become more popular. Government decline and disparagement correlates with a rise in the view that the private sector can do everything better and faster. Private sector provisioning of government responsibilities, though, is not always cheaper or more efficient over the long-term. I worked for a large federal government in the 1980s and saw first-hand what occurs when governments reduce the federal workforce to save money: human need does not go away when government workers are laid off; governments typically pay more to private sector employees to do the same jobs instead. And, as we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, some governments are extremely efficient providing for the healthcare needs of their citizens.

The shift to the private sector was a trend that spread and accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, reaching newly independent postcolonial countries with fledgling economies like Sierra Leone. Such nations were forced to embrace macroeconomic austerity plans as a condition of getting cash to build hospitals, roads and utilities. Decades of deals came with strings attached. Aid for infrastructure was often conditional on spending 40–70% on private sector business from the donor country, depriving aspiring young economies of new business development and sovereignty.

The good news is that government response can change from one pandemic to the next. Since 2017, the African continent has built its own Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Nigeria, which skillfully managed its few cases of Ebola during the 2014–2016 outbreak, quickly sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/sars-cov-2-seqs/ ). At Sierra Leone’s international airport, passengers have been quarantined since 3 February 2020 (to get a sense of how early in the outbreak that was: it was two days before the US Senate voted on their president’s impeachment). Since mid-February, handwashing stations have been set up outside of businesses in the capital city. Sierra Leone’s president has visited the airport, border checkpoints and hospitals, where he calmly encouraged people to use their experience with Ebola to fight COVID-19. Sierra Leone’s preparedness has limits, but the point is that people there know what to do in a pandemic. Its government, which negotiated the timely import of test kits and secured external funding, knows its role too. Sierra Leone, the country ravaged by Ebola 6 years ago, has been testing for coronavirus but as of 24 March is one of the few countries in the world without a single confirmed case of COVID-19.

When the COVID-19 pandemic emergency ends, there needs to be a worldwide reckoning with what governments are for. Governments cut to the bone cannot respond easily or quickly. Pandemics are no longer unexpected events and those who claim otherwise are using old stochastic models and ignoring the world around us. It’s not just that population pressures—for food, housing and income—will continue to push humans into wildlife habitat that will set off other unknown animal–human disease chains. Pandemics are also a result of economic growth-at-any-cost ideologies, those that call for ploughing down rainforests, systematically indenturing huge swathes of frontline healthcare workers and fighting the regulation of health sector profit-mongering. Governments cannot exist solely as payers-of-last-resort. They too need to be valued and nurtured back to health, so that they can sustain us when our needs hit pandemic proportions.

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Government in a pandemic: how coronavirus caused a dramatic shift in our relationship with the state

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As we head into the colder months, the increased threat of a second spike in the pandemic has forced the UK government to reintroduce new restrictive measures, including targeted local lockdowns, new rules (“of six”) and early pub closures. At the same time, compliance is fraying.

One of the deeper issues with the government restrictions, which has less often been discussed, is a moral one. It concerns the level of control we grant to the government over our individual healthcare decisions.

Understanding this dimension helps to explain why many people around the world are disobeying restrictions. Recent UK data indicates that of those who reported having COVID-19 symptoms in the last seven days, only 18.2% said they were following the self-isolation requirements. While there are a number of reasons for this growing reluctance to obey, the one I want to highlight here is the moral dimension.

The basic question is this: is it acceptable for the state to take control of our healthcare decisions in order to protect us?

There are two sides to the argument. The case against increased state control appeals to the value of individual autonomy over health choices. The case in favour appeals to the importance of paternalism and harm prevention. These values sit at opposite ends of a moral and legal spectrum. Our view on government restrictions is shaped by how we, as individuals, weigh up the relative importance of these two competing principles.

Autonomy and the right to choose risk

Jonathan Sumption, former Supreme Court justice, recently came down firmly on the pro-autonomy side of the issue . “What I’m advocating now,” he told the BBC, “is that the lockdown should become entirely voluntary. It is up to us, not the state, to decide what risks we are going to take with our own bodies.”

In ordinary circumstances, choices over our health are fundamentally ours to make. We choose whether to smoke or drink heavily, whether to exercise, whether to eat junk food, take drugs or use contraception. Governments provide education, advice and guidance on risks, and in some cases use taxes and nudges to attach incentives or disincentives to certain decisions. Yet, ultimately, the government grants us autonomy over these healthcare choices.

The coronavirus restrictions represent a significant transition away from this. Sanctions are now imposed if we choose not to wear a mask, meet too many people at the park, have a party at our house or stand too close to people.

In this respect, the coronavirus restrictions are fundamentally opposed to a contemporary system of law, ethics and policy around healthcare based on protecting autonomy and free choice. This system was birthed after the second world war, with the introduction of the Nuremburg Code . That code, which was a response to the horrors of the medical trials that took place under the Third Reich , placed informed consent as the central principle in medical treatment.

Paternalism and harm prevention

Of course, certain features of the coronavirus threat make it much more difficult to grant full autonomy over healthcare choices. Unlike other ubiquitous viruses, there are a number of unknowns around coronavirus. There is also a very low level of immunity .

The ethical argument that challenges autonomy and supports government restrictions has two aspects. The first is paternalism . In government policy terms, paternalism is when governments impose restrictions on our free action in order to protect us. Many paternalistic interventions are so embedded that we forget they exist. Examples include the legal requirement to wear seatbelts or to wear a helmet on a motorbike.

A one-way system operates on a high street.

These are paternalistic policies – they bypass our free choice in order to serve our best interests. The same holds of many of the coronavirus restrictions, such as pub closures or bans on social gatherings.

The other aspect to the government intervention is the protection of others. Coronavirus is, of course, highly contagious, and poses a risk not only to us as individuals but to the wider community as well, particularly those who are vulnerable.

Yet, as we are seeing, bringing in too many paternalistic and community-protecting restrictions risks a backlash. Not everyone is subject to the same risks, so blanket paternalistic measures disproportionately affect the lives of those who really face little risk. It is well known, for example, that the young are at less risk than the old from COVID-19. This is particularly problematic if you factor in the further hidden risks posed to children by missing substantial parts of their education. Not to mention the risks to mental health and physical health that come from intense lockdown measures.

Our relationship with the state has shifted with the coronavirus restrictions. We now live in times where choices that were once entirely our own have been taken on by the government, with sanctions if we disobey. The right to make personal health decisions and decisions about risk, which has been central to our modern system of medical ethics, policy and law, has been curtailed.

For many, the threats posed by coronavirus justify this change. But if that right is curtailed for a prolonged period, there are problematic implications. It may, for example, signal a period of change to our system of civil liberties. We are already seeing this to an extent with the new legislation which increases police powers and limits rights to free movement and data control. We must be careful that these changes are temporary and not entrenched.

The government needs to strike the right balance between autonomy and harm prevention when deciding on coronavirus restrictions – to effectively combat the disease, but also to avoid the disobedience that naturally results when individual rights to autonomous choice are curtailed.

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COVID-19 and its Impact: Seven Essays on Reframing Government Management and Operations

In re-framing government management and operations, this compendium of seven essays highlights several key themes:

Changing the nature of work focuses on government jobs best suited to shift virtually, the new “workday,” best practices, government as a model workplace, and workplace health, safety, and privacy.
Reimagining how government delivers services and products to the public explores ways to improve operational effectiveness by addressing engagement, equity, and culture in government service delivery.
Managing risk and building resilience focuses on building supply chain resiliency making them immune to unpredictable shocks, emphasizing the critical importance of managing risks and vulnerabilities effectively while also identifying principles that fosters trust in institutions and how they operate in times of crisis.

We hope that government leaders and stakeholders across the country and around the world find the insights in this special report helpful as they adapt changes necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic into their longer term operations.

Listen to an interview with Tom Temin and Michael Keegan on Federal News Network.

Read the article in Government Executive!

Coronavirus overview: How political ideology and governmental incompetence can kill you

By John Mecklin | March 27, 2020

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The world is suffering the kind of pandemic that many experts (including those writing in the Bulletin ) have long warned was all but bound to occur. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, governments around the world—including, notably, the US federal government—failed to adequately prepare for today’s pandemic and are therefore responding haplessly as COVID-19 spreads. In the United States, the Trump administration’s incoherent reaction to the coronavirus pandemic has created a grisly sort of natural experiment in distributed governance: State and local officials, public health experts, the media, and citizens at large have been left to fill medical service, supply, and information gaps that would not exist if the central government had anything like a serious handle on the situation.

I have no idea what result this unplanned civic experiment will produce. My hope is that American expertise, ingenuity, and community spirit can work a minor miracle, pushing the White House toward a more energetic, more scientific, and more truthful response to the coronavirus crisis as local and state officials marshal resources and save as many lives as possible. But this is no time to sugar-coat ugly facts: The Trump administration’s response to this pandemic has been tactically inept and almost completely lacking in anything like a strategic approach . The prior sentence is not to suggest the Trump administration is alone in its incompetence. The experience of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom shows that so-called developed countries of many stripes can respond ineffectively to crisis.

But until recently, the United States was considered the world leader in public health, the essential linchpin in the world’s efforts to monitor incipient outbreaks and limit their spread. The US failure in dealing with COVID-19 domestically is therefore reflective of a larger problem—the erosion of the international infrastructure for dealing with major global threats in general. In 2020, go-it-alone political nationalism—in the United States, China, Russia, and other countries around the world—will be a contributing factor in the unnecessary deaths of at least tens of thousands (and perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions) of people in a pandemic that could and should have been greatly limited by effective international cooperation.

If carried on long enough, similarly ineffective and nationalistic approaches to the major global risks posed by nuclear weapons and climate change will inevitably result in catastrophe so extraordinary in scope as to make the current coronavirus pandemic seem a minor inconvenience. The real question on the table now is whether leaders of the United States and other major countries will decide that the short-term political benefit that national exceptionalism may confer is more important than the shared, long-term interest their citizens have in survival. It is this simple: To deal competently with the current pandemic and protect humanity over the longer term, the major nations of the world will need to subordinate nationalistic political ideology to international cooperation aimed at the preservation of lives and futures.

America First and its Russian and Chinese analogs may be temporarily profitable in terms of domestic political benefit for sloganeering national leaders. As the coronavirus pandemic is making clear, however, nationalistic ideologies can be dangerous to human health, sometimes on a vast scale.

Many warnings, little response. The Bulletin has covered global biological threats for decades, in articles written by a wide variety of top public health experts. That coverage has largely revolved around biological weapons, how to limit and eliminate them, and how to prepare for and respond to a bio-attack, should a country or terrorist launch one. Our biosecurity experts have, however, also devoted significant time and space to the need for countries around the world to prepare, in concert, for natural outbreaks of disease, even though they are not the kind of man-made threat that the Bulletin generally focuses on (see: nuclear weapons ).

There are a couple of reasons for our longstanding interest in disease outbreaks, including the coronavirus pandemic the world now suffers. First, the governments known to have attempted to make and defend against bioweapons have tended to research pathogens—anthrax and smallpox, for example—that made the jump from animal reservoirs to human populations. Also, preparations to reduce the impact of such zoonotic disease outbreaks could serve to protect society during an attack involving biological weapons. The public health preparations required to limit the biological carnage are essentially the same in both cases.

Long before the new coronavirus disease now officially named COVID-19 emerged in China, Bulletin experts made clear that the United States was ill-prepared to respond to either a naturally occurring pandemic or a purposeful bioattack. Princeton University public health expert and Bulletin columnist Laura Kahn has been especially prescient in regard to natural outbreaks of disease. A little more than a month before President Trump assumed office, Kahn wrote a piece, headlined “Biodefense and the next presidency,” that argued for increased public health preparedness to deal with emerging zoonotic diseases—that is, diseases like COVID-19. Another of her columns , written in January 2019, included sentences that, unfortunately, couldn’t be more applicable to today’s pandemic-altered world: “But imagine the chaos that could ensue if the United States were confronted with an actual crisis caused by outside forces, such as an influenza pandemic or bioterrorist attack. With so little trust in government, and eroding trust in science due to false information—sometimes peddled by those in power themselves—America is vulnerable. Distrust, unfortunately, makes it difficult to prevent, prepare for, or recover from a major public health emergency.”

But Kahn is no lone outlier. Many experts, in and out of government, have long urged the US government to better prepare for the possibility of a pandemic, to little avail. In fact, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services ran a series of exercises in 2019 based on a fictional pandemic scenario code-named “Crimson Contagion.” Those exercises , revealed recently in the New York Times , produced “sobering results— contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported—[that] drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

“The draft report, marked ‘not to be disclosed,’ laid out in stark detail repeated cases of ‘confusion’ in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings,” the Times reported, adding, quite accurately, that those shortcomings “are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country.”

Public pressure for better government performance. As many news outlets have documented, some governments around the world—among them South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, which had previous experience with another lethal coronavirus disease, SARS—have responded relatively effectively to the novel coronavirus outbreak. Here in the United States, however, the failure to plan for and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic has been glaringly obvious. Through repeated cuts to the budget s of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies tasked with outbreak control in the United States and around the world, the disbanding of the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense , and a failure to follow its own strategic biodefense plan, the Trump administration hollowed out the domestic and international infrastructure needed to respond to a biological emergency.

The initially slow and inept US response to the COVID-19 outbreak appeared early last week to be headed in a somewhat more realistic and less overtly political direction. President Trump at long last acknowledged the pandemic as real, designating it a national emergency; allowed trusted experts such as Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to step to the fore in terms of public communication; and began to announce social-distancing steps that are at least reasonably aligned with the magnitude of the risk that the pandemic poses. As the president limited, for a few days, his downplaying of the pandemic, calls for national unity multiplied, along with suggestions that now is not the time to assign blame, but to act to reduce the scope of and eventually quench the outbreak.

Just the same, the president returned relatively quickly to dissembling about the pandemic, saying last Tuesday that he has always thought COVID-19 was a serious pandemic threat, even though video recordings of his own on-the-record statements completely belie that assertion. He has also made assertions about efforts to greatly increase testing and production of equipment to deal with the crisis; those assertions seem, sadly, to have been exaggerated or simply untrue. And this week he has begun talking about an early end to the social distancing effort that aims to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients—even though public health experts warn that such an early opening of the US economy could result in chaos and large-scale death.

The US federal response to the pandemic will likely continue to lag and be incoherent. This response to COVID-19 is suboptimal, but it seems the reality America must live and, unfortunately, die with in coming weeks.

To improve the federal response to the greatest extent possible, public health experts in the US government will need to continue to push, wheedle, and flatter President Trump, in whatever ways that work to move him toward positive action and outcomes—knowing, all the while, that he may very well speak and tweet in ways that sometimes sabotage effective public health policy. Two steps forward and one back may be the best America and the world can expect from this particular administration. Meanwhile, public health experts outside the government will have to continue to hold Trump and top appointees in his administration rigorously to account. At the same time, state and local public health officials will need to act to protect the people they serve in whatever ways they can.

US citizens also have a role to play. As they cooperate in the mass social distancing that is the best chance for limiting the spread of COVID-19, they too need to maintain political pressure on the federal government—via social media and in communication to their representatives in Congress—to step up its coronavirus response. Unity does not require that citizens cheerlead an incompetent governmental response to a lethal disease.

Finally, as the pandemic plays out, the fact-based American press needs to keep doing what it does best: Reporters should continue to ask important, challenging questions, even and especially when they are embarrassing to those in power. The consistent pointing up of difficulties or failures in the governmental response to the pandemic is a key component of the effort to diminish those difficulties and failures. An active, principled, fact-based press is also vital to the suppression of false conspiracy theories and propaganda that are all too easily spread in an internet-dependent world.

Preparing for future global threats. As the current crisis ebbs—and it will, whether in two months or nine or 12 or 18, with more or fewer deaths, depending—responsible public officials, the fact-based press, and the public at large will need to focus on steps that reduce the likelihood and severity of future pandemics. Those plans should focus on restoring the eviscerated US and world infrastructure that aims to discover and deal with emerging biological threats. In a statement in January, the Bulletin ’s Science and Security Board moved the Doomsday Clock as close as it has ever been to midnight—that is, to the end of civilization—in significant part because world leaders had allowed the international political infrastructure for managing major global threats to erode. It is clear that the infrastructure for dealing with global biological threats is indeed in disarray and needs fundamental reform that focuses on improved transparency and early information sharing.

But the global threat management problem is far larger than the current pandemic.

Regardless of the ideology of their leaders, nations and citizens of the world have important interests that coincide; they face common threats that dictate collective action. Nationalism may be useful as a domestic political wedge, but as a framework for effective policy it is fundamentally unsuited to the many truly global existential threats—nuclear, climatic, biological, and other—that the 21 st century world faces. If the Apocalypse arrives, its four horsemen won’t respect national borders or discriminate by political ideology. They are dedicated globalists, equal-opportunity destroyers of lives and civilizations. Keeping them at bay requires coordinated preparation and a cooperative response that is essentially international in nature. The current pandemic is only the latest addition to a long, blood-soaked line of evidence that extreme nationalism is a failed—and far too often deadly—ideology, a badly dated relic and an utterly bankrupt approach to modern governance. There is plenty of room to accommodate it in history’s dustbin. Where it has long belonged.

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Keywords: America First , COVID-19 , Coronavirus , ideology , nationalism , pandemic Topics: Biosecurity

Well said. International cooperation is the only way for us all to survive & prosper. This pandemic may be the gruesome wake-up call

Well said international cooperation is the only way for us all to survive and not International WARS and BULLYING. Imagine mankind being wiped off the planet earth by a single COVID-19 virus.

It appears that the only US exceptionalism is that we now have more COVID cases than does China (with a quarter of the population).

Someone tell me why there is such a long list of ‘Essential Workers’? People are being told you need to come to work.

Very well written, but you need to add more to the equation. 1) The media’s incompetence and lack of social, moral, and ethical responsibility in its relentless pursuit of “ratings come first”. 2) Let’s not forget “GREED”. The very small population of individuals that control most of the wealth in this nation are making millions by taking advantage and manipulating the market’s volatility. How many of these same individuals have come forward to take an active/adequate role in being part of the solution? Take a look at the “pork” that was added to the bailout bill and you will find … Read more »

Very well written and coherent article. However, I have serious doubts whether or not the avg american citizen will actually hold their incompetent govenment responsible for their inactions and missteps seeing that most of our country is too blindsided by the idiotic right wing/left wing rhetoric.

John Mecklin

John Mecklin is the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists . Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Miller-McCune ... Read More

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Top Issues Related to Government Ethics During This Time of Pandemic
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COVID-19: Ethics, Health and Moving Forward

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Gen Z: Government Ethics During This Time of Pandemic

The ongoing pandemic is affecting every portion of society around the world, but the members of Generation Z, because of the transitional stage of their lives, face a unique set of concerns.

United States Capitol

Mariana Perera ’20 is a Fullbright Scholar and Hackworth Fellow with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are her own.

The current situation of the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, and specifically in the U.S., has brought new concerns surrounding government ethics to the table, as citizens are posed with dilemmas related to the government’s role in their daily lives. Although the pandemic is impacting every part of society, this post focuses on dilemmas that are especially prominent in the minds of members of Generation Z as they embark on a transitional period in their lives. The impacts of this pandemic are expected to have lasting marks on their lives, especially as many enter the workforce and adulthood.

Here are some of the top issues related to government ethics that have arisen during the pandemic and are worth considering, especially for members of Generation Z.

1. Individual Freedom vs. Collective Action

The United States was founded on values of individual freedoms and rights granted by and protected from the government in order to ensure democratic values. The pandemic, however, has shifted its focus towards collective action solutions. This is creating a sense of fear among citizens who feel that the government is overstepping its power by limiting people’s ability to go into public spaces and attend large gatherings. People around the country are ignoring orders by state officials claiming an infringement on freedoms like the ability to peacefully assemble at the beach. However, they refrain from stating how their personal actions could have repercussions for the health of others and lead to shelter-in-place extensions.

Although some people may not believe in or care about the impacts of Covid-19, their disregard for health puts others at risk, not just themselves. This brings the question of the role that the government could have in enforcing certain restrictions. How should they, if at all, use their power to promote adequate responses to the virus while still ensuring citizens’ individual rights?

For members of Generation Z, one of the least at-risk groups for Covid-19, the need for collective action has been proven to be absolutely necessary in the fight against the spreading of the virus. However, this means that people must alter their daily lives and refrain from doing things like seeing friends or attending events. The shift towards collective action may be a hard adjustment for Americans that value their individual rights, yet it paves the way toward a sense of normality in the near future.

2020 is an important year in terms of politics as Donald Trump’s term as president is nearing the end. Similarly, there are hundreds of races up and down the ballot that are relying on voter participation during both the primaries and the November election. Given current circumstances, those who would typically go out and vote may be limited or unable to do so for various reasons, which raises the question of whether elections should be postponed until further notice or continue as scheduled. Is it ethical to ask people to risk their health to vote or simply abstain from voting?

Some states have decided to carry out their elections, like Wisconsin, which recently held its primary, despite the Democrats’ attempt to postpone it. However, controversy struck as people stood in crowded lines for hours despite nationwide orders to practice social distancing and stay home. Those who were aware and had the resources to do so, could request an absentee ballot online to mail in their votes. Many, however, were left disenfranchised, including healthcare and essential workers. This decision posed several ethical dilemmas as people’s health was put at risk and many were excluded from participating in the democratic process.

The situation in Wisconsin, however, is paving the way towards a change in voting as people aim to find a way to be civically active in times of pandemic and social distancing. It is promoting discussion on upcoming elections in other states. Sixteen states have either postponed their election date or moved toward a vote-by-mail method, hoping these changes facilitate voting for their constituents and provide them time to adjust.

For many members of Gen Z, this election is their first time as eligible voters. Their vote matters as those elected will likely be in charge of dealing with the repercussions of the pandemic. However, young voters are still seen as the most apathetic age group. The question of whether abstaining from voting is unethical also arises as people seek solutions for the pandemic. By facilitating voting and providing access to information, the government can ensure higher potential levels of participation in upcoming elections.

3. The Economy and Unemployment

The economy has come to a complete halt since the outbreak. As more businesses close their doors and people lose their jobs, unemployment rates have skyrocketed nationwide and continue to rise. This is leading to the concern that the economy won’t be able to meet everyone’s needs. Although Congress has passed legislation to help individuals and small businesses, state governments may need to get involved. One of the biggest concerns to this level of government support and “bailout” has been echoed by those who believe in a lower level of government involvement. Who should be involved and prioritized in their legislation? This question comes after Governor Gavin Newsom of California received backlash for announcing statewide funds for undocumented immigrants. To what extent should the government commit tax-payer funds to help Americans, and logistically what can be done? How can government involvement be approached ethically?

For members of Gen Z, the potential inability of the economy to fully recover poses a threat to their current or near-future role in the workforce. Many of the older members of this generation are entering the workforce, either out of college or high school, with entry-level jobs on their radar. If positions of higher experience and long-term roles are kept, those in entry-level positions and internships may see their opportunities and jobs disappear. Similarly, members of Gen Z are unlikely to receive money from the stimulus bill passed by Congress. This bill aims to provide relief to small businesses, states, and individuals. However, there are certain requirements for one to receive the $1,200 check, with Generation Z citizens largely not qualifying due to their likely status as dependents.

As states attempt to return to normal, the government will have to decide what role, if any, it will take to help boost the economy. They’ll need to decide at what point the economy can safely re-open, with fear that a wrong decision will lead to higher deaths and a longer recovery period. Their decisions should be based on ethical perspectives that center around citizens and their wellbeing.

4. Media and Disinformation

Fake news and misinformation are common instances in our lives as social media plays a large role in politics and our news consumption. Bad actors can easily spread lies on any subject with little repercussion, and therefore consumers must take responsibility for verifying sources into their own hands. Who should be policing this information? What happens when people who are part of the government contribute to the fake news, as most social platforms allow them to do?

During this time of pandemic, the cases of misinformation have increased and in some cases, been pushed out by influential groups like TV networks and government officials. Individuals that do not believe in the value of scientific data are some of the main contributors to the spread of misinformation, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who shared his belief that the virus does not pose any risk at all for people under 25, although scientific facts say otherwise. This behavior by those in power is unethical, as it puts the lives of the audience at risk when they take the information at face value. Fake symptoms, number of cases/deaths, and unfounded solutions to the virus are all examples of misinformation that have spread throughout the media in the last few months.

Given most members of Gen Z are highly connected through social media and receive their news through these channels; it’s crucial that networks address the spread of misinformation and closely monitor its sources. The more people exposed to this information, especially from those with authority and to whom we hold a higher standard, the greater the impact that the pandemic will have.

5. New Basic Rights?

As daily lives are changing, we are relying more on things like technology and the internet to complete tasks that might otherwise have been done in person. As children switch into online classes and people work from home, the topic of access and what a government should ensure as basic rights for people becomes more relevant. This is especially an issue as some Americans already lacked access to the internet before the outbreak and now may be unable to pay their bills, with fear of losing such access. Should the government aim to ensure all children have internet access and the basic tools to learn online the same way they provide books and meals?

Our ideas of what human rights are or what classifies as a necessity are shifting and therefore we ask whether it is now the government’s job to provide those in the way they help provide others. What happens when children cannot take classes during shelter-in-place due to lack of access to technology?

The internet is one of the biggest sources that people are relying on now and seeing as a necessity, especially members of Generation Z, who have grown up alongside technology and require it for classes and jobs, yet until the pandemic, it was seen as a privilege rather than a right. If this definition and the need for the internet has changed, what does it mean for privacy and security rights?

The list of concerns with regards to government ethics that has arisen from this pandemic is long. However, these are five issues that directly impact the lives of Generation Z in America. Although all these issues have different focuses and affect Americans differently, their similarities stand in the idea that the role of government is changing as the virus spreads.

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Global Health

Efficiency in the governance of the Covid-19 pandemic: political and territorial factors

Pedro-josé martínez-córdoba.

1 Department of Accounting and Finance, Faculty of Economics and Business, Regional Campus of International Excellence “Campus Mare Nostrum”, University of Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain

Bernardino Benito

Isabel-maría garcía-sánchez.

2 Instituto Multidisciplinar de Empresa, Campus Miguel de Unamuno, Universidad de Salamanca, 37007 Salamanca, Spain

Associated Data

Not applicable.

Conclusions

Introduction

Theoretical framework

Literature in times of pandemic

Governance of pandemics

Efficient health management

The speed and volatility of the pandemic has meant a complicated statistical process to homogenize data and provide valid and reliable information is needed. In order to analyze the level of efficiency in the management of the pandemic, it is necessary to have a certain number of comparable observations. The data offered by international organizations (World Bank, WHO, International Monetary Fund (IMF)) regarding the 237 countries of the world, are considered the most appropriate sources of information today. In addition, since the beginning of the pandemic, management has been led by national governments, which set the guidelines and standardize decisions at the country level. Therefore, the most appropriate units of analysis are the countries, although we have had to select those that report on the variables needed to calculate efficiency (see Table 1 ). Thus, once the countries with incomplete or erroneous data have been filtered out, the final sample was a set of 155 countries. Figures 1 and and2 2 show the countries included in the sample, with the exclusion of a small group that did not adequately report the necessary variables.

Description and descriptive statistics of the inputs, outputs, efficiency and environmental variables

Variable	Description	Min	Mean	Median	Max	Standard deviation

Physicians	Total number of physicians per thousand inhabitants	0.0140	1.9042	1.6090	7.1201	1.6125
Nurses	Total number of nurses, midwives and other associated personnel per thousand inhabitants	0.0737	4.5672	2.9460	19.4614	4.3775
Hospital beds	Beds available in public and private hospitals per thousand inhabitants	0.1000	2.8419	2.2000	13.4000	2.3871
Health expenditure	Level of current health expenditure expressed as a percentage of GDP	1.1812	6.5678	6.4294	17.0613	2.5149

Cases confirmed	Total number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 per thousand inhabitants as February 1, 2021	0.0088	20.5396	11.7416	92.5357	22.7485
Death rate	Total number of deaths with Covid-19 per thousand confirmed cases as February 1, 2021	0.4871	20.5774	17.7672	85.1128	12.9607

Efficiency	Own elaboration from DEA technique	0.6018	0.8965	0.9399	1.0000	0.1092

Europe	Dummy variable that takes the value 1 if the country belongs to the European region established by the WHO and 0 otherwise	0.0000	0.2968	0.0000	1.0000	0.4583
Americas	Dummy variable that takes the value 1 if the country belongs to the American region established by the WHO and 0 otherwise	0.0000	0.1871	0.0000	1.0000	0.3913
Asia	Dummy variable that takes the value 1 if the country belongs to the regions of South-East Asia and Western Pacific established by the WHO and 0 otherwise	0.0000	0.1226	0.0000	1.0000	0.3290
Africa	Dummy variable that takes the value 1 if the country belongs to the regions of Africa and Eastern Mediterranean established by the WHO and 0 otherwise	0.0000	0.3935	0.0000	1.0000	0.4901
Gender	Dummy variable that takes the value 1 if the government leader is a woman and 0 if it is a man	0.0000	0.1032	0.0000	1.0000	0.3052
Ideology	Dummy variable that takes the value 1 if the government leader’s ideology is conservative and 0 if it is progressive	0.0000	0.4839	0.0000	1.0000	0.5014
Voice	Quality of freedom of expression, association, media, and citizen participation in the election of government, which takes values between 0 and 100	2.4631	48.5238	45.3202	100.0000	28.4050
Rule of law	Society’s compliance with the rule of law, which takes values between 0 and 100	0.4808	48.3468	46.1538	100.0000	28.6079
Median age	Median age of the population	15.1510	30.5919	30.2620	48.3580	9.3129
GDP	Forecast year-on-year change in gross domestic product at constant prices as a percentage for 2019	−35.0000	2.5109	2.3350	9.8900	4.1384
Tourism	Income from international tourism as a percentage of total exports in goods and services	0.1888	13.7942	7.7834	85.2048	16.4688
Unemployment	Unemployment rate forecast for 2019	0.2950	7.1966	7.1966	28.7000	3.7324

a Data from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator?tab=all Accessed February, 2021

b Data from https://covid19.who.int/table Accessed February, 2021

c Own elaboration after consulting web information about the country

d Data from http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/ Accessed February, 2021

e Data from https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2020/October Accessed February, 2021

f Data from https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/ Accessed July, 2021

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Graphic representation of efficiency levels

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Graphic representation of the output Cases confirmed

To calculate the levels of efficiency with DEA, the inputs and outputs must be selected, and these are will be determined by the research objective. In our case, to determine the efficiency of pandemic management, the inputs refer to the resources available to manage a health crisis of these characteristics, and the outputs to its direct consequences. Thus, following the most recent literature analyzing efficiency in the health sector [ 17 , 29 ], the selected inputs are the available physicians ( Physicians ) and nurses ( Nurses ), the number of hospital beds ( Hospital beds ) and the current expenditure on health care ( Health expenditure ), while the number of people infected by Covid-19 ( Cases confirmed ) and the number of deaths ( Death rate ) form the outputs. Table Table1 1 explains each input and output in more detail, as well as the sources of information and descriptive statistics.

Environmental variables

The variables Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa reflect the health regions established by the WHO. Gender represents the gender of the national government leader, which takes the value 1 if female and 0 for male. Ideology takes the value 1 for conservative rulers and 0 for progressive ones. Among the governance indicators we have selected those directly related to the management of the Covid-19 pandemic ( Voice and Rule of law ). Voice indicates freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of the media, and by choosing it we intend to show governments’ commitment to transparency. Rule of law reflects compliance and respect for established rules. Median age represents the median age of the population. GDP is the percentage of year-on-year change in constant prices of Gross Domestic Product for 2019. Tourism is the percentage of exports in goods and services that represent the income obtained from international visitors. Unemployment is the unemployment rate in 2019. Table Table1 1 specifies in more detail these variables, their descriptive statistics and the sources of information.

Regression model

To determine the impact of environmental variables on efficiency levels, we estimated the following regression model:

where δ ^ i represents the level of efficiency for each country; α is the constant of the model; β j are the coefficients of each variable; Europe , Americas , Asia , Africa , Gender , Ideology , Voice , Rule of law , Median age , GDP , Tourism and Unemployment , are the environmental variables; and ε i is the term of error.

Coefficient of correlation among inputs-outputs and environmental variables



Nurses	***0.6773	1.0000
Hospital beds	***0.6526	***0.5949	1.0000
Health expenditure	***0.4247	***0.5122	***0.3134	1.0000
Cases confirmed	***0.6539	***0.5337	***0.3989	***0.4089	1.0000
Death rate	−0.1118	−0.1779	− 0.1035	0.1340	− 0.1005


Americas	**-0.3117	1.0000
Asia	−0.2428	−0.1793	1.0000
Africa	***-0.5233	***-0.3865	**-0.3011	1.0000
Gender	0.2438	−0.0540	0.0672	−0.2299	1.0000
Ideology	0.2470	−0.0011	−0.1257	− 0.1458	0.0110	1.0000
Voice	***0.4351	0.1725	−0.0382	***-0.5190	**0.2962	0.2188	1.0000
Rule of law	***0.4641	−0.0999	0.1354	***-0.4451	**0.3003	0.2596	***0.7771	1.0000
Median age	***0.6808	0.0007	0.1257	***-0.7216	*0.2652	0.2350	***0.6245	***0.7520	1.0000
GDP	0.0647	*-0.2939	0.1290	0.0876	0.0474	−0.0061	−0.0009	0.0485	−0.1038	1.0000
Tourism	−0.1434	0.1676	0.0550	−0.0366	0.0212	−0.0033	0.0907	0.0142	−0.0665	0.0710	1.0000
Unemployment	−0.0719	0.0246	−0.2461	0.2128	−0.1427	−0.0858	− 0.0813	−0.1811	− 0.1416	−0.0652	0.1823

Significance: ***1%, **5%, *10%

Regression results

	Territory				Politics	Governance	Full model
	***1.13882252 (39.7714)	***1.20099835 (29.7455)	***1.05303212 (29.1811)	***1.07536113 (23.9262)	***1.18039374 (41.3537)	***1.19211379 (43.4479)	***1.16284408 (38.7763)	***1.22670332 (29.4041)	***1.10365424 (27.4265)	***1.11890372 (23.3499)
Europe	***-0.06346139 (− 2.7537)	***-0.12563723 (− 6.2090)	0.02232901 (1.1001)	–	–	–	*-0.04394037 (− 1.8185)	***-0.10779960 (− 5.1252)	0.01524948 (0.7627)	–
Americas	***-0.08579040 (− 4.7282)	***-0.14796623 (− 6.7889)	–	−0.02232900 (− 1.1001)	–	–	***-0.05918985 (− 2.9290)	***-0.12304908 (− 5.3670)	–	− 0.01524948 (− 0.7627)
Asia	***0.06217583 (2.7625)	–	***0.14796623 (6.7889)	***0.12563723 (6.2090)	–	–	***0.06385923 (2.8670)	–	***0.12304908 (5.3670)	***0.10779960 (5.1252)
Africa	–	***-0.06217583 (− 2.7625)	***0.08579040 (4.7283)	***0.06346139 (2.7537)	–	–	–	***-0.06385924 (− 2.8671)	***0.05918985 (2.9291)	*0.04394037 (1.8186)
Gender	–	–	–	–	0.02873892 (1.2928)	–	*0.03336502 (1.7703)	*0.03336502 (1.7704)	*0.03336502 (1.7704)	*0.03336502 (1.7703)
Ideology	–	–	–	–	−0.01847490 (− 1.3876)	–	−0.00797304 (− 0.7023)	−0.00797304 (− 0.7023)	−0.00797304 (− 0.7023)	−0.00797304 (− 0.7023)
Voice	–	–	–	–	–	***-0.00165806 (−4.8315)	**-0.00087394 (− 2.4875)	**-0.00087394 (− 2.4875)	**-0.00087394 (− 2.4875)	**-0.00087394 (− 2.4875)
Rule of law	–	–	–	–	–	***0.00187573 (4.5877)	**0.00102903 (2.4508)	**0.00102902 (2.4508)	**0.00102903 (2.4508)	**0.00102903 (2.4508)
Median age	***-0.00562925 (− 5.4577)	***-0.00562924 (− 5.4577)	***-0.00562924 (− 5.4577)	***-0.00562925 (− 5.4577)	***-0.00749303 (− 9.9649)	***-0.00861878 (− 8.4901)	***-0.00715986 (− 5.2347)	***-0.00715986 (− 5.2349)	***-0.00715986 (− 5.2349)	***-0.00715986 (− 5.2349)
GDP	*-0.00257486 (−1.7851)	*-0.00257486 (− 1.7852)	*-0.00257486 (− 1.7852)	*-0.00257486 (− 1.7851)	−0.00061309 (− 0.3870)	−0.00139629 (− 0.9318)	*-0.00277236 (− 1.9548)	*-0.00277236 (− 1.9548)	*-0.00277236 (− 1.9548)	*-0.00277236 (− 1.9548)
Tourism	**0.00086839 (2.4614)	**0.00086839 (2.4615)	**0.00086839 (2.4615)	**0.00086839 (2.4614)	*0.00078553 (1.9563)	**0.00094593 (2.4973)	**0.00084939 (2.4560)	**0.00084943 (2.4562)	**0.00084941 (2.4562)	**0.00084941 (2.4562)
Unemployment	***-0.00672044 (− 4.2442)	***-0.00672044 (− 4.2442)	***-0.00672044 (− 4.2442)	***-0.00672044 (− 4.2442)	***-0.00805795 (− 4.4772)	***-0.00718747 (− 4.2797)	***-0.00593488 (− 3.7825)	***-0.00593487 (− 3.7826)	***-0.00593488 (− 3.7826)	***-0.00593488 (− 3.7826)

Significance: ***1%, **5%, *10%, coefficient and (t-value)

The efficiency levels are shown in Fig. 1 , where we observe a significant difference between regions ( Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa ). The countries of Europe and Americas obtain on average lower values compared to those of Asia and Africa (see Table 3 ). We found that the less efficient countries, which are represented with a lighter color in Fig. Fig.1, 1 , obtain a darker color in Fig. 2 . Thus, the countries of Europe and the Americas show a higher average incidence ( Cases confirmed ) than the countries of Asia and Africa (see Table Table3 3 ).

Average value of inputs, outputs and efficiency by geographical region


Physicians	3.6686	1.9782	1.6531	0.6167
Nurses	8.7961	3.4903	4.8689	1.7961
Hospital beds	5.1000	2.0552	3.2895	1.3738
Health expenditure	7.9148	7.2415	5.3588	5.6083
Cases confirmed	42.4300	22.2633	4.6839	8.1513
Death rate	18.6998	26.4294	16.8990	20.3571
Efficiency	0.8041	0.8481	0.9833	0.9622

If the countries of Europe and the Americas have more resources (inputs) for pandemic management (see Table Table3), 3 ), their results should be more favorable. If this is not the case, we confirm the inefficiency in the management of health resources by these countries. These data could be explained by the capacity and information acquired in recent decades in Asian countries, as a result of having effectively combated similar viruses (SARS and MERS-CoV). This is also the case in African countries, where they coexist with more uncontrolled diseases (Ebola and Malaria) that bestow on society a greater awareness of the extraordinary measures of health protection. Although the average efficiency of Africa is higher than that of Europe or Americas, some countries with economic and tourism solvency are below the average of the latter, as is the case of South Africa or Tunisia (0.7352 and 0.8093, respectively).

The estimation of the regression model (1) provides information on the effect of environmental variables on efficiency levels (see Table Table4). 4 ). Taking into account the perfect multicollinearity that would exist if we regressed the variables Europe , Americas , Asia and Africa in the same model, we performed four regressions, alternatively omitting one of these variables and maintaining the rest (Full model), to secure more robust results. In addition, as a preliminary step to this complete model, we estimated the individual impact of the Territory, Politics and Governance variables on efficiency levels. These results allow us to know the relevance of each group of variables in the efficient management of the pandemic.

Conclusions and policy implications

Acknowledgements

Authors’ contributions.

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Pedro-José Martínez-Córdoba, Email: [email protected] .

Bernardino Benito, Email: se.mu@lbotineb .

Isabel-María García-Sánchez, Email: se.lasu@afejal .

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Covid-19: scientific arguments, denialism, eugenics, and the construction of the antisocial distancing discourse in brazil.

$\nClaudia Malinverni$

1 Faculty of Public Health's Audioteca Collection, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
2 School of Arts Science and Humanities, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Since March 11, the world has been experiencing a pandemic of Sars-Cov-2, the new coronavirus, which emerged in China in late December 2019 and causes the COVID-19 disease. Pandemics are characterized by pathogen's ability of emerging or re-emerging across geographical boundaries, simultaneously affecting a large number of people around the world, due to the sustained transmission in humans. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed in real time the dissemination of different types of information about it and strategies used to contain the rate of virus contamination. Our main goal in this study is to analyze the discursive production of the Brazilian journalistic media about vertical isolation as a supposed scientific strategy, and to demonstrate how that has been used in the denialist approach adopted by the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. The research was carried out on the Google platform, using the following descriptors: coronavirus and herd immunity; coronavirus and the Imperial College herd immunity strategy; vertical isolation; Bolsonaro and vertical isolation. Thirty-six articles were selected for a qualitative analysis besides the original article by David L. Katz (published in The New York Times), where he claims the creation of the vertical confinement strategy. All documents of the analytical corpus are open and free of charge. The articles were submitted to discursive analysis and the main results shows that Brazilian media highlighted Bolsonaro's proposal of vertical isolation and amplified his pandemic denial and eugenics policies The mass media vehicles play a central role in the dissemination of information and should commit to the publication of reliable and trustworthy information, as well as to objectively situate the areas of knowledge of the specialists whose opinions are being published.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic presents itself as concerning for the majority of people across the planet. This concern is guided by a number of characteristics of Sars-Cov-2 and by the contemporary lifestyle. The virus has a high potential for dissemination in the globalized world—by mid-August 2020, more than 20.7 million people had been contaminated; part of this contingent became seriously ill, requiring hospitalization, and nearly 780 thousand people had died 1 . There is still no treatment available for this disease, nor vaccines that might prevent infection. These factors, together with the lack of knowledge and the uncertainties on the evolution of the infection/disease, as well as the post-infection immunological responses, have led to great investments in scientific research in the several fields of science, while at the same time the population searches incessantly for information in order to make sense of their own experiences.

Within this context of a pandemic, mass media holds a key social role; as a source of information that is historically recognized and trustworthy, the media has been disseminating and modeling the ways in which ordinary people think about and deal with everyday events. It is important to remember that the conditions of truth and of social justification are the pillars that support the belief in journalistic discourse, which becomes trustworthy and credible as long as it manages to prove the veracity of its testimony, by means of the detailing of facts and the citation of specialized sources ( Lisboa and Benetti, 2015 ).

It is important to note, however, that this “proof of veracity” does not make news stories “mirrors” of reality, but instead, simply one of the possible narratives about social occurrences. Transformed into information, these occurrences are shared between members of society and journalists, who in turn claim a monopoly on this knowledge (defining what is news), meaning that, more than passive observers, they are active participants in the construction of reality ( Traquina, 2007 ). Although creative, journalistic activity is submitted to a number of “tyrannies”: of the deadlines and formats of journalistic production; of superior hierarchies (editors-in-chief, news editors, and, frequently, the owners of the platforms); the imperatives of journalism as a business; the extreme competition; and the action/pressure of different social actors searching to highlight their own matters ( Traquina, 2007 ). Thus, newsmaking results in journalism's capacity for producing social facts, in other words, for instituting realities, according to the repertories and contexts that the journalist chooses to use.

We have, in addition, used journalistic discursive practices within the perspective offered by Van Der Haak et al. (2012) , who state that journalism, as a public asset, should produce information and analyses that are useful for democratic societies, based on transparency, independence, the use of reliable sources, and the detailed analysis of events.

In this text we took the journalistic coverage of COVID-19 as a producer of meanings and social facts ( Spink, 2004 ). We also used the perspective of Thompson (2014) , for whom the process of news production, whichever it may be, always occurs within a socio-historical context that allows media outlets to capture and transform a certain number of everyday events into messages (symbolic forms) in detriment of an infinity of others.

We considered the context of exceptionality of the pandemic, where researchers and scientists are being obliged to accelerate their production to a rhythm never seen before, in order to provide clinical responses to the disease and guide public policies and State actions for managing public health around the world. This implies that most of the knowledge produced about Sars-CoV-2 and the disease it causes is being permanently revised, refuted, and discarded.

The problem is that, with this frenetic production, the refuted suppositions have often already reached a level of dissemination and absorption by common sense and even by public authorities which, due to a variety of interests, makes it impossible to revert their use, remaining as valid points of view. In other words, even when these suppositions have been invalidated by science, they continue as a social fact, affecting the lives of people and the manners in which they make their decisions when faced with the epidemic. Thus, it is important for journalists and mass media companies to be vigilant regarding the possible consequences of the content they relay.

We are referring, therefore, to the decisive role played by mass media in structuring the public space. This is a sensitive debate around the world, as it involves controlling the access to the production and circulation of the information that is transformed into messages (symbolic content) by a restricted number of actors, according to private interests or that of the groups that the media represents ( Thompson, 2014 ). This aspect is especially problematic in Brazil. The country has a historical asymmetry in the relationship between mass media and society, establishing what Kucinski (2006) call the “principle of exclusion,” violating the human right to information.

In Brazil, different from that which occurred for the most part in the liberal democracies of the global North, the mediatic market is marked by an ideological, economic, and political homogeneity that is usually pro-establishment. From the start, the media—and particularly the press—has historically reproduced with great fidelity the oligarchic model of land ownership, with a predominance in newspaper management of the “favoritism typical of the command culture of large rural properties” ( Kucinski, 2006 , p. 20).

The business model for national media is amplified by Brazil's complexity. Companies are configurated as oligopolies, with properties that are horizontal, vertical, and crisscrossed by different mediums (newspapers, magazines, AM and FM radio, open access and pay TV, internet provider) within the same market, whether local, regional, or national. This process was accentuated by the privatization of telecommunications during the 1990s ( de Lima, 2001 , 2011 ; Malinverni, 2016 ). Currently, according to the Brazilian section of the MOM (Media Ownership Monitor)/Reporters Sans Frontiéres, eight economic family groups control 26 of the 50 largest media vehicles in the country, according to audience and to scheduling capacity; in other words, in terms of potential to influence public opinion.

Divided into four large sectors (print, radio, TV, and online), the study, which resulted in the report “Who controls the media in Brazil,” released in late 2017, indicates a red alert for the Brazilian mediatic system due to the high concentration of audience and properties, the high geographic concentration, and the lack of transparency, besides economic, political, and religious interference in the production of information 2 . Seven of the twelve vehicles that published the news stories analyzed in this work integrate the control group describe above. The most paradigmatic of these is the Globo group, the largest oligopoly in this sector in Brazil and Latin America, and one of the largest in the world, with more than half of the audience among the first four (36.9%). The concentration of media outlets by a small number of private groups restricts competition and, consequently, the diversity to represent the distinct interests of society. Without the possibility of contradiction, there is a predominance in the mediatic market of what many studies and analysts call “penseé unique” ( de Lima, 2011 ).

Faced with such a complex dynamic—taken here in the sense proposed by Law and Mol (2002) , according to whom innumerable actors, materialities, and sociabilities perform the several facets of a phenomenon—and with the up-to-the-minute scope of the pandemic, which takes place in real time, journalistic coverage is up against enormous difficulties. These range from the immediacy of translating the technical-scientific knowledge of several fields to critical evaluations on what to publish and the possible effects.

Historically, at moments of public health emergency, the population and journalists wait to receive trustworthy information from governmental organizations and political leaderships, whose actions are based on the guidance of health authorities. In Brazil, however, besides this complexity that is inherent to the pandemic, mass media must deal with other challenges. The first, as we will see in the analyses, lies in reporting two distinct official discourses on controlling COVID-19: that of the president of the Republic and his supporters; and that of the scientists in the field of health, technicians from the Ministry of Health (in the first months), and governors and mayors who are favorable to social distancing. This resulted in a politicization of the actions for disease control.

Brazil has a Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde—SUS) that guarantees universal health access to all within the national territory; the System is well-structured and organized in a decentralized manner. Since the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution, it is up to the federal government to establish guidelines and coordinate healthcare actions, allocating a budget for the states and municipalities, who manage resources and actions according to local/regional needs. This system counts on a structure of sanitary surveillance and consolidated data registration that allows the monitoring of healthcare actions throughout the country. The pandemic, however, hit Brazil at a point when SUS has been weakened, since, as stated by Menezes et al. (2019) , from 2016 a policy of defunding healthcare has been implemented, by means of the approval of a constitutional amendment that froze the federal budget in this sector for the next 20 years, with readjustment calculations based only on inflation. This policy of deconstructing SUS has intensified during the Bolsonaro government, with already-perceptible effects upon the population's health: “For example, the loss of 8.5 thousand Cuban doctors from the More Doctors Program, who were treating around 30 million Brazilians, in 2.9 thousand municipalities and indigenous villages” ( Menezes et al., 2019 , p. 67).

Despite this process of scrapping, from January to May the technical team of the Ministry of Health, responsible for managing SUS, carried out assertive actions relating to the pandemic, creating decrees, establishing benchmarks for action, and guiding the population. The president of the Republic, however, who refuses to acknowledge the severity of the pandemic, has been producing and divulging, from the start, counterinformation that contradicts the ministerial discourse. Within this context, on April 16, Bolsonaro dismissed the minister of Health, doctor and politician, and nominated a new leader for the department, an oncologist and business entrepreneur who works in the private sector. With a more technical profile, he remained only 28 days in office, and resigned due to disagreeing with the president's position regarding use of chloroquine to combat COVID-19. Therefore, since May 15, the position of minister of Health has been occupied in an interim manner by a general without any health background, who nominated other members of the military, equally without specialized training, to key roles in the Ministry of Health, furthering the dismantling of SUS 3 .

Brazilian journalism gave plenty of space for this polarization between the president and his supporters and the Ministry of Health, during the first months of the pandemic, as well as to the national and international scientific community on the subject of measures of social distancing. The analysis of articles indicated that the journalistic coverage often considered both discourses as equivalent, even knowing that the president and his supporters had no scientific backing—on the contrary, they often based themselves on false news and unfounded calculations.

For Gelbspan (1998 , p. 57–58), in discussing journalistic coverage of global warning:

The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present competing points of view. When the issue is of a political or social nature, fairness – presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight – is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to issues of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of views on a scientific question as though they had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not.

In this sense, it is crucial that journalists covering themes that involve science know how to translate the concepts and recognize strong evidence so as not to fall into the mistake that Pitts (2018) designates “ both-sideism.” Rosen (2010) , discussing this journalistic strategy, states that it is often adopted in order to seek an “objectivity,” by means of which the journalist would speak from a supposed position of neutrality (a view from nowhere), and could not therefore be accused of favoring one position. For Sousa (2002) , this position is a tributary of two ideological forces that modulate news: that of objectivity and that of professionalism. The first explains the descriptive and factual orientation of news, with its mimetic ambition regarding reality that becomes explicit, and the systematic identification of sources of information in news statements; the second is based on the belief that the production routine and professional experience are sufficient tools for journalistic exemption. Supported by deontological codes constructed throughout history, the journalist acts as a “professional authority,” imbued with the right and the obligation to mediate and simplify information on daily happenings ( Traquina, 2007 ). In other words, under the jargon “interests of society,” the press acts within a discursive safe conduct that “authorizes” the prescription of standards and practices, while at the same time serving as an “argumentative shield” that protects and exempts journalists and owners of communication vehicles from the consequences of their discursive practices ( Malinverni et al., 2012 ). This strategy, however, impedes a deeper analysis and the production of precise information based on the truth.

Another challenge that journalists face is the increasingly precarious nature of work in newsrooms, and a lack of specialization in the area of health ( Malinverni and Cuenca, 2017 ), both of which have become more of an issue over the past decade with the financial crisis that has impacted media companies, especially print journalism, due to the rise of virtual media ( Castilho, 2015 ), affecting directly the quality of the news. Vukasovich and Vukasovich (2016) indicate, additionally, that globalization and the incessant pressures of newsmaking are two more elements that greatly impact the quality of journalistic coverage.

Methodology

In this work we carried out the discursive analysis of journalistic coverage following two key thematic lines: herd immunity and vertical isolation. Using Google search, we researched news articles on the Sars-CoV-2 epidemic in Brazil using four descriptors: 1—Herd immunity and coronavirus; 2—Herd immunity and Imperial College; 3—Vertical isolation; and 4—Bolsonaro and vertical isolation. Criteria for inclusion: the first three pages of results presented by Google; articles published by print media and mass news sites with high visitation numbers and open access links. Criteria for exclusion: blogs with no connection to mass media or governmental and non-governmental organizations; low repercussion media, videos and links that can be exclusively accessed by subscribers; texts reproduced ipsis litteris on other sites.

The time period set for article selection was March 16 to April 30, 2020, starting 5 days before the date on which the Ministry of Health confirmed community transmission of the disease in the country (March 20) and a public health emergency was declared by most state and municipal governments.

In the first phase of systemization, 101 texts were located; of these, after application of the above criteria, 36 were selected for analysis: 8 articles under descriptor 1; 8 under descriptor 2; 11 under descriptor 3; and 9 under descriptor 4. All texts were copied into Word to be later read in full and analyzed. The texts were published on 12 websites, linked to nine media groups: UOL, Folha de S.Paulo and Bol/UOL (Grupo Folha); O Globo (Organizações Globo); Saúde Estadão (Grupo Estado); Saúde Abril and Veja (Grupo Abril); Gazeta do Acre (independent); IstoÉ Dinheiro (Editora Três); BBC News Brasil (a subsidiary of BBC, controlled by the British government); El País Brasil (from the Spanish group PRISA); and CNN Brasil (a subsidiary of the American CNN). The four first, as already mentioned, are among the organizations that control almost 60% of the national audience. Historically, they operate under the establishment logic, with episodic demonstrations of divergences that lend an appearance of plurality. Rarely do they explicitly support a candidate or political party, although the journalistic coverage is always more favorable to agendas that adopt a center or right-wing positioning within the political spectrum. This perspective, shared by IstoÉ Dinheiro and CNN Brasil, has been in effect in the country since mid-March of 2020. The Gazeta do Acre is the only independent vehicle; in other words, that is not connected to a multimedia conglomerate. It was founded by two reporters who worked at an alternative newspaper which, in the 1970s, challenged the censorship imposed by the military regime and reported the daily violence committed by the large landowners against the small-scale rubber tree tappers—among them Acre environmentalist Chico Mendes, murdered by local ranchers in 1988. El País Brasil and BBC News Brasil follow the more liberal line of journalistic coverage set by their parent companies. These characteristics may explain why these three vehicles were the only ones to adopt a more critical approach to Bolsonaro's discourse, as will be discussed.

We adopted the theoretical perspective of discursive practices ( Spink, 2004 ), focusing on the language in use, a social practice analyzed in the intersection between performative aspects of language (when, in which conditions, with what intention, in which manner) and the conditions of production (understood in this case both as social and interactional context, and in the Foucauldian sense of historical constructions).

In this approach, the notion of interpretative repertories of Wetherell and Potter (1988 , p. 172) is central:

Repertoires could be seen as building blocks speakers use for constructing versions of actions, cognitive processes, and other phenomena. Any particular repertoire is constructed out of a restricted range of terms used in a specific stylistic and grammatical fashion. Commonly these terms are derived from one or more key metaphors and the presence of a repertoire will often be signaled by certain tropes or figures of speech.

The circulation dynamic of the interpretative repertories, within the flow of production of meanings, updates contents and processes present in the history of a society.

In this analysis we looked for these standards in the journalistic coverage of the two studied themes, making clear the content of the discussions and marking out the meanings they produce, as well as situating the contexts for production of the articles. Therefore, throughout the text, we introduce episodes and events that contextualize the analysis and help us to understand the scenario for news production, since, as stated by Rosen et al. (1997 , p.3), “[…] the journalism itself, the art of telling our collective story, is never independent of the country and culture in which the story is told.”

Strategies of Social Distancing and Herd Immunity in Brazil

The strategies of social distancing and of herd immunity were already circulating in Brazilian media before the official declaration of sustained transmission of Sars-CoV-2 in the country. We carried out this study associating the descriptor “Herd immunity” to coronavirus and to Imperial College. Next, we introduce the main results of the discursive analysis, discussing the meanings produced by the articles found with these descriptors.

The first article with the descriptor herd immunity (“What is ‘group immunity,' the polemical strategy of the United Kingdom to combat coronavirus” 4 ) dates from March 16, and was published by two large Brazilian news sites; its central theme is the debate surrounding the measures adopted by the United Kingdom. The article discusses the criticism suffered by the British government that, contrary to countries such as Italy, Spain, and France, had decided not to adopt a strategy of social suppression, betting on the free circulation of the virus in order to consequently lead the population toward herd immunity (a mitigation strategy). According to this text, the mitigation measure would help preserve the economy, since all activities would remain operational. The key criticism stemmed from the scientific community, for whom mitigation would lead to an uncontrolled growth in the number of people contaminated by Sars-CoV-2, with an inevitable rise in infections and the overburdening of the National Health Service (NHS) due to hospitalization demands for severe cases. This debate permeated the 16 articles analyzed under the descriptor “Herd immunity,” progressively incorporating references to reports from the Imperial College.

All the articles analyzed, when discussing herd immunity, made reference at some point to the United Kingdom and/or its prime minister and team. The United States and its president were also cited in six articles. Thus, we can say that the debate on social distancing, in Brazil, was closely connected to the measures and pronouncements of British and North American political authorities. Despite herd immunity having been considered and discussed in other cities/countries in Europe, the perspective that dominated the Brazilian news was that of the UK and the USA.

In addition to the positioning of political authorities, the scientific reports of the Imperial College were also widely commented on by the Brazilian media, and for this reason it was included as a descriptor. This institution appears often as being responsible for publishing studies that made the UK and the USA give up on the mitigation strategy. The majority of articles published between March 17 and April 24 refer directly to a specific report by the Imperial College, made public on March 16, which presents calculations regarding the lethality of the disease and the number of sick people according to each behavioral strategy adopted by the two countries. Only one article, from March 26, cites the report that makes estimates regarding the possible effects of the different non-pharmacological strategies in Brazil.

It is interesting to observe that, among the group of articles discussing herd immunity there are explanations on what this strategy entails. But most of these (5 articles) promote a simplification of this strategy, which can be explained by observing the authorship of the analyzed texts: only in three were the authors specialists. The first of these, mentioned above and produced by BBC News Brasil, is signed by a foreign journalist, a specialist in scientific communication. The second—““Coronavirus: must almost everyone catch it to end the pandemic?” 5 , from March 25, published in the health section of the website of Veja magazine—was written by two Brazilian researchers from the field of microbiology who acted as scientific disseminators. In this article there is a clear effort to translate expert knowledge for ordinary non-specialized readers, in a clear and simple manner, focusing on the reasons that herd immunity could not be legitimized by science to guide public policies against Sars-CoV-2. The third article—“Who is immune to coronavirus?” 6 , published on April 14 by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo and available on the UOL website—was written by Marc Lipsitch, a professor of Epidemiology at Harvard University's School of Public Health. Published originally in the New York Times , it is a direct translation. In these three articles, there is a greater care in explaining herd immunity, based on scientific knowledge.

Another factor that could explain the simplifications and superficial approaches adopted by the Brazilian media for the theme of herd immunity relates to the sources consulted and used in the articles. Historically, the production of news articles in the field of health includes consultation with known specialists who can expound on the theme with authority, productivity, and credibility, conferring legitimacy and reliability to the information presented ( Tuchman, 1983 ; Traquina, 2007 ). However, with regard to the debate on herd immunity, the analyzed articles make little use of consulting epidemiologists, the most appropriate specialists when it comes to this theme. Among the medical sources, the articles prioritized the opinions of virologists, infectious disease specialists, and immunologists; only four epidemiologists were consulted—two Brazilians, one from North America, and one from India. This may have contributed toward the polarization of measures of social distancing, as the guidelines suggested by epidemiology would explain with more clarity the catastrophic effects of the epidemic on the healthcare system and, consequently, on people's lives, if natural herd immunity were to be adopted in the country.

The articles that cite the reports of the Imperial College approach the theme in a manner that presents, together with projections of mathematical models that favor suppression, the arguments contrary to this measure, as well as the “harmful” effects of broad and unrestricted social distancing on the economy.

The concept of herd immunity has a longstanding and legitimate scientific basis, which postulates that the infection of a percentage of the population is enough to block transmission of a virus, and therefore can contain or even eradicate it within a certain territory. Since this debate began, the World Health Organization (WHO) and scientists all over the world have explained that this concept applies to immunization by means of vaccinations, and that investing in natural herd immunity against COVID-19 would overburden the healthcare systems, causing hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths.

The positioning of some government leaders in favor of this strategy appears to be oriented by Malthusian theories, according to which some populations, such as the elderly, can be considered as weak and surplus ( Mezzadra, 2020 ). In this manner, they could become “naturally” extinct by pandemics, such as the case of COVID-19. Hannah et al. (2020) observe that, by defending herd immunity, governors assume that the biopolitical interests of capital take precedence over the biopolitical interests of life. One of the articles of the corpus emphasizes that matters of economy were decisive in the debate on herd immunity. The text “Specialists recommend herd immunity for poor countries 7 ”—produced by Bloomberg, a news agency of the financial sector, and published in the finance section of UOL on April 22—, presents herd immunity as the only alternative for poor, young countries such as India. The journalist presents arguments from an Indian epidemiologist as well as researchers from the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy and Princeton University in defense of this strategy:

[…] allow the virus to circulate in a controlled manner throughout the next seven months would provide immunity to 60% of the country's population by November, and thus, contain the disease. Mortality could be limited while the virus propagates, in comparison to European countries, such as Italy, since 93.5% of the Indian population is under 65 years, it is said, although they have not divulged projections on the number of dead .

The article is overly brief, but points out that this is a risky strategy, concluding that at the moment not much was known regarding immunity to coronavirus.

The possibility of using the strategy of herd immunity to minimize the effects of the pandemic on the economy was discussed hypothetically in many of the articles analyzed, but not indicated as a viable solution. For instance, the texts that mention this discussion in the United Kingdom clarify that the British government refuted that they were seeking herd immunity. This proposal would be morally unacceptable, since the known lethality data indicates that this strategy would imply acceptance and recognition that at least 1% of the population could die, in addition to a high number of hospitalizations, leading to a collapse of the healthcare services.

In the 16 articles analyzed with descriptors 1 and 2, only one has a critical approach and presents the Imperial College projections for Brazil. The article is “Coronavirus pandemic: the best scenario is disastrous 8 ,” published on March 30 on the website of the Gazeta do Acre , a local newspaper of the state of Acre, at the extreme north of the country. The text presents the calculations for the newspaper's hometown, the state capital Rio Branco, informing the amount of people who would get sick and die if suppression were not adopted. The other articles touched generically upon the theme, without taking the trouble to inform about the effects of different measures within the local contexts of Brazilian cities with their inequalities.

Among the articles of this corpus , the only argument in favor of herd immunity that had no economic framing was that of a supposed prevention of a second wave of the disease, since in the countries that adopted restrictive measures only a small portion of the population would have had contact with the virus, and thus the virus would once again strike these populations.

Before we continue the discussion, it is important to present the facts for the Brazilian context. From March 11, some state governors and mayors began to declare non-pharmacological measures to deal with the pandemic, following recommendations from the Ministry of Health and creating scientific committees. Throughout that entire month, several states and municipalities suspended classes at all educational levels, prohibiting events and religious services, and closing commerce and non-essential services, maintaining only healthcare, pharmacies, and grocery stores, in addition to bars, restaurants, and bakeries, although these last could only serve customers by delivery. These measures met with strong resistance from entrepreneurs and politicians, especially the president of the Republic and his social and political support base.

In this manner, from mid-March and throughout the month of April, the media began to include in discussions of the pandemic the financial damage that social distancing measures could provoke, and the effects on people's daily lives. In this context, the news began to construct a narrative around the concept of “two sides”; one favorable to the strategy of seeking herd immunity, and the other, to social distancing. As previously discussed, his false equivalency between scientifically based arguments and fragile arguments supported by hypotheses is damaging to the coverage of scientific themes ( Gelbspan, 1998 ).

With regard to herd immunity, this approach was present in many of the articles analyzed, with only two of the news stories breaking this logic. The first, titled “Epidemiologist opposes Osmar Terra and sees Brazil as far from the end of the epidemic 9 ,” from April 14, published on the UOL website, the journalist presents the arguments of an epidemiologist to deconstruct the reasoning presented by congressman Osmar Terra 10 , an advisor to Bolsonaro and part of his support base. As the central character in the text, and in opposition to Osmar Terra, the epidemiologist, who is also the rector of a federal university, demonstrates with data and scientific evidence that the country was far from reaching herd immunity, and points out the political polarization of the debate on social distancing:

The discussion about social distancing in all the media is based on ideology and not science. There is a group of people who think we must relax and who voted on the same candidate [Bolsonaro], and the other people, who voted against, are in favor of distancing .

The epidemiologist's perception on the role of the media in this polarization is precise. Osmar Terra is a member of Congress who, despite a degree in medicine and an appointment as Health Secretary, is not a specialist in this theme. It is worth noting that, according to the evaluation carried out by the website Radar aos Fatos, which checks and verifies fake news , he was the parliamentary member who most divulged false news on COVID-19 11 . More than that, the fact that there was a link to the video in which the congressman reproduces false news signals that the news site UOL itself contributed toward disseminating an opinion that, based on antiscientific visions, not only encourages the political polarization of the epidemic scenario, but also confuses the population. This polarization indicates a narrative framing typical of political coverage, in which reality is taken as “[…] a field in conflict, a bipolar world of successive hostilities” ( Motta, 2007 , p. 10), feeding the confrontation with successive affirmations that belie the sources, in a dramatic game based on the notion of contradiction. In the case of this coverage, the narrative option for the “two opposite sides” of the phenomenon makes no sense, as by giving equal weight and space to the scientific evidence and positioning of the majority of national and international scientists, and the opinions of a small group of denialist politicians with an anti-science agenda, the media breaks their social commitment of informing the population correctly about phenomena and events that impact daily life, such as the case of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The second article for the descriptor “herd immunity”—the previously mentioned “Coronavirus pandemic: the best scenario is disastrous” of the Gazeta do Acre —was the only one among the 16 news stories analyzed to critically situate the attacks of Bolsonaro and his supporters upon suppression measures. The text, with authorship stated simply as “Newsroom,” classifies Bolsonaro's statements as unfounded and absurd:

At this moment, the majority of countries, the Ministry of Health of Brazil, governors and mayors from all around the country, based on directives given by the WHO, are trying to adopt the measure of suppression to control the epidemic in Brazil .

However, president Bolsonaro and a small group of his counselors and advisors (which includes his children) are the only dissonant voices and are actively advocating the adoption of the mitigation strategy to control dissemination of the virus in Brazil .

This is a noisy minority, incidentally. Thanks to the control that the president and his children have over their thousands of fanatic followers, the social networks are inundated with the most absurd campaigns in favor of this option of control .

From “Vertical Interdiction” to “Vertical Isolation,” The Use of Scientists' Opinions for Denialism

The analysis demonstrated that the use of the terminology “vertical isolation” was imposed by President Bolsonaro himself and naturalized by the media. On March 24, in a pronouncement on the radio and TV network 12 , he urged the population to abandon the social distancing measures that had been recommended by the Ministry of Health and which, as previously mentioned, had been adopted by several governors and mayors. His proposal: keep in confinement only the so-called risk groups. In Brazil, this would be the elderly population over 60 years of age and those with chronic diseases, besides symptomatic cases. In his speech, which shocked the national and international scientific community and those Brazilians who had adhered to social distancing—at least 50% of the population, in several regions, at the start of community transmission—, Bolsonaro stated that COVID-19 was just “a little flu,” a “little cold” that was inoffensive to the majority of the young and the healthy who, like him, had an “athletic history” 13 . The following morning (25), when asked by a reporter how the country would protect these vulnerable groups, he answered: “[…] there is horizontal isolation, that they're doing here, and there's the vertical. It's the vertical [for groups at risk]” 14 .

The term vertical isolation resonated intensely in newspapers and news sites, and, after March 25, it was in the title of the 20 articles analyzed for descriptors 3 and 4 (“Vertical” isolation” and “Bolsonaro and vertical isolation”). When explaining the concept proposed by Bolsonaro, three texts cited the hypotheses of David L. Katz, a doctor who specialized in diet and nutrition 15 , which were published in an article in The New York Times , on March 20, 2020, with one text also bringing up an article by epidemiologist John Ioannidis, statistician, and co-director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, published on March 17, on the StatNews website. Both were critics of the social suppression measures proposed and adopted in some Asian and European countries.

The analysis also suggested that the terminology “vertical isolation” which circulated in the national media was a translation of the arguments proposed by Katz, which were in turn anchored on the debate about herd immunity and the initial mitigation strategies adopted by the UK and USA to deal with the pandemic. Although quickly rejected by the scientific community, “isolation” as a synonym to distancing continued to resonate in Brazilian newspapers and news sites and is still used today in this sense.

Katz's article (“Is our fight against coronavirus worse than the disease?”) was published 5 days before Bolsonaro's interview. In it, Katz employs classic concepts of epidemiology to make a misleading analysis, based on a still-fragile foundation of data about the pandemic, as we will see in the following analysis. Centered on repertories from epidemiology, he frames social distancing as a potentially harmful “war” strategy, with socioeconomic consequences and effects upon the healthcare systems that could be worse than the disease. From the very start, with the title, Katz makes use of militaristic metaphors—a longstanding and recurring discursive strategy in all dimensions of the dissemination of science and medicine ( Wenner, 2007 )—in order to build his thesis for reducing the costs of the “war” against the new coronavirus.

He supports his arguments by interpreting data from South Korea, which indicated that 99% of COVID-19 cases were light, while the lethality of the disease basically affected those who were more vulnerable. Still employing war metaphors, Katz concludes that the most advisable approach would be a “surgical strike,” naming this a “vertical interdiction,” which would consist in forbidding circulation only for those who are most vulnerable and exposing the majority of the population to the virus, thus attaining herd immunity. In the text, even though the social impact of distancing is mentioned, it is clear that the specialist is preoccupied with the financial aspect:

I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly more severe than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order ( Katz, 2020 ).

Likewise, the arguments made by Ioannidis—in the article “We know enough now to act decisively against COVID-19. Social distancing is a good place to start”—focused on the economic effects of distancing measures:

If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It's like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies ( Ioannidis, 2020 ).

The hypotheses of Ioannidis and, mainly, Katz gather elements that are of great use to the interests of the denialists, in the sense used by Hoofnagle and Hoofnagle (2007) and referenced by Diethelm and McKee (2009) , for whom the denialist discourse is constructed around rhetorical arguments,

[…] to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one's viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions ( Hoofnagle and Hoofnagle, 2007 ).

The denial is constructed with basis on five discursive tactics which, together or separately, produce pseudoscientific discourse ( Hoofnagle and Hoofnagle, 2007 ; Diethelm and McKee, 2009 ). Three of these bring to light the manner in which the arguments of the two American specialists help sustain the denialism of President Bolsonaro and his supporters: (1) selectivity in choosing out-of-context scientific data in order to suggest error; (2) the use of specialists whose opinions are inconsistent with the knowledge established by scientific canon; and (3) resorting to isolated articles that challenge the dominant consensus as a means of discrediting the entire field.

In Brazil, the hypotheses of Ioannidis and, above all, Katz were presented by the media as an explanation for the vertical isolation proposed by Bolsonaro. The news stories also included criticism of this strategy by Brazilian and international specialists. This is what can be surmised from the article “What is the vertical isolation that Bolsonaro wants and why do specialists fear it will cause more deaths 16 ” published on the BBC News Brasil website, on March 25. In this news piece, the arguments of the two American specialists are rejected by the scientific community, due to their hypothetical nature, based on fragile data and a partial analysis that does not include the response capacity of the healthcare system; in this case, American healthcare. One of the opposing sources presented in the article is Harry Crane, a statistics professor from Rutgers University, who considered that their mistake was:

[…] to allow themselves to be affected by the desire to negate a situation that can cause despair. “Under severe uncertainty, it's natural instinct and common sense to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”, wrote Crane, in response to the article by Ioannidis. This is because the mortality rate does not depend only on the clinical picture that the virus itself can produce, but also the capacity for response of societies for treating the sick .

The text makes it clear that, while the hypotheses of the two specialists were refuted by their peers, they were rapidly embraced by neoliberal politicians and economists, becoming “[…] music for the ears of the governmental economy teams who were trying to finish public accounting in midst of the perspective of recession” (BBC News Brasil, 2020). The journalist who authored the text supports this statement by citing part of an editorial from The Wall Street Journal , published in the wake of the Ioannidis article:

“ America urgently needs a pandemic strategy that is more economically and socially sustainable than the current national lockdown”, summarized the editorial from The Wall Street Journal, known for expressing the thoughts of the American economic elite, a week ago .

In the same article, the journalist affirms that the conclusions of Katz and Ioannidis acquired a following in the team of the Brazilian minister of Economy, “[…] in search of a gentler solution for the public health crisis.”

But it was, above all, the political support base of denialist leaders that took on the hypotheses of the two specialists and began using them to contest social distancing measures. In the news piece “Why is vertical isolation seen with skepticism 17 ?” produced by the agency Conteúdo Estadão and published on five news sites, on March 30, there is a clear use of these specialist arguments in the discourse against distancing:

Defended by President Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called “vertical isolation” of the population is a minority theory among scientists and is viewed with skepticism by the medical community. It consists on separating those who are in the risk group from being exposed to the virus, such as those older than 60 and those with chronic diseases (UOL, March 30).

Although the title of the article points to skepticism, the body of text brings a plurality of opinions, under the dichotomy of pros-cons and advantages-disadvantages of this strategy, including the discussion on herd immunity as a strategy and the reasons it was discarded in the United Kingdom. The most interesting point brought up in the article is a comparison of the supporters of Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. After informing that the American president had recommended extreme distancing, following the publication of the Imperial College study on March 16, the article adds that Trump went back to defending a quick return to activities in the United States, projecting a flexibilization in 10 days, which did not end up taking place but still had repercussions among Bolsonaro supporters:

Excerpts of the video with this speech from the American [Trump] were disseminated by supporters of Bolsonaro in Brazil, as a supposed sign that the Americans would relax their measures. After being criticized, Trump pulled back and said that the date to reopen the country was just a suggestion, but that the end of social isolation would not take place without backing from scientists. The day before yesterday, Trump affirmed that he is thinking of establishing an official quarantine for states such as New York (which has the majority of cases), New Jersey and Connecticut .

This text makes it clear how the denialist discourse of Trump and Bolsonaro align and, at the same time, how the largely connected environments of the social networks serve as feedback for both of their support bases. However, by indicating a new retreat by Trump, the text also demonstrates that his denialism was more vulnerable to scientific and medical arguments in favor of social distancing. The impression that we get is that Trump oscillates, either denying the scientific reading of the severity of the pandemic in his discourse and actions, or accepting information from scientists, different in this way from Bolsonaro, who has been unwavering in his denialist positioning from the start of the epidemic in Brazil.

Media Adhesion and Naturalization of “Vertical Isolation”

In the 20 articles analyzed for descriptor 3 (Vertical isolation), vertical isolation appears as a specific type of social distancing, allowing us to infer the media's unrestricted adhesion to the terminology, central to the sum of information circulated in both corpora . Instrumental, 10 of the 11 titles for descriptor 3 were constructed around the notions of functioning/operation of this model, seeking to explain vertical isolation with its advantages, disadvantages, and risks 18 .

We raised several hypotheses on what may have contributed to this: the generalist nature and increasingly precarious state of Brazilian mass journalism and the absence of epidemiologists as sources for news stories, already discussed in this work; the didacticism employed in the framing of texts, announced even in the titles.

This pedagogic concern brings to light the efforts made by journalists to translate to readers, who are always assumed to be laypeople, the technical-scientific jargon employed in the news. This didacticism—which legitimizes journalists as “[…] the place of ‘being able to show', of ‘being able to say' and ‘being able to analyze' (…) as a place of mediation and of revelation of truth” ( Vizeu, 2009 , p. 77)—may have contributed in particular toward the production of the meaning of “vertical isolation” as a scientifically validated consensus strategy that “mirrors” a supposed epidemiological reality, aseptic and neutral.

It is necessary, therefore, to problematize the media's naturalization of “vertical isolation” to express measures of social distancing (quarantine, cordon sanitaire , lockdown). In first place, the terminology confuses two distinct models of attention to epidemics. In the field of health, including Brazil, the established scientific consensus uses the term isolation to designate the care given to an infected and symptomatic patient, and is therefore a model for individual attention, belonging to the field of clinical medicine; distancing, on the other hand, implies collective/populational care, affiliated to epidemiology.

The use of “social isolation” in the place of social distancing is also a sematic error as it is based on a false synonymy. In the Portuguese language, “isolate” means to separate, segregate, and confine a person from all others in their social circle—in Brazilian dictionaries, among examples of isolate, we find medical activity aimed at treating patients with contagious diseases. On the other hand, distancing is the act or effect of separating people/groups, centered on a notion of physical space and not segregation.

By using one term in place of another, naturalizing a theoretical hypothesis that is still under discussion and therefore not validated by the scientific community, the media legitimized the term social isolation as common sense. And this may have contributed to the construction of a derogatory meaning for the strategy of social distancing, amplifying the resistance of the Brazilian population toward this measure.

Vertical Isolation, Denialism, and Eugenics

The denialist discourse throughout the world is not just aligned to anti-science, but also resonates as a more or less homogeneous mark of eugenics. In Brazil, this is no different. The social and scientific movement for improving the human race that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and was widely experimented with by the German Nazi regime during World War II (1939–1945), arrived in the country in 1918, with the creation of the Eugenics Society of São Paulo. Intellectuals from several areas notably from medicine and the public health services, gathered around this movement, and the triad of sanitation, hygiene, and eugenics supported a broad and generalized project for civilizational progress ( Maciel, 1999 ), with medical knowledge playing a central role.

Racial regeneration would occur by means of three types of eugenics: positive, negative, and preventive. This last, also called prophylactic hygiene by Brazilian eugenists, was mixed with principles of rural and urban sanitation, the suppression of social vices such as alcoholism, control of immigration and of matrimony, and the compulsory sterilization of “degenerates.” In the 1930s, the main activist in Brazilian eugenics, Renato Kehl, openly assumed his favorable position to some of the measures adopted by the German eugenics movement ( Kobayashi et al., 2009 ).

Thus, the world eugenics ideology met the Brazilian positivist-hygienist movement, forming a new and active field, of hygienist-physicians, the protagonists and disseminators of the eugenics elements that would mark the actions of Brazilian public health for the next decades, and which still linger today in many practices, especially in the field of social care. This scientific rationality led to the implementation of “[…] projects of eugenic nature that intended to eliminate disease, separate madness and poverty” ( Schwarcz, 1993 , p. 34), focusing mainly on immigrants, Black people, and the poor ( Diwan, 2007 ). Acting in an intensive manner, the hygienist doctors undertook “[…] what they imagined to be a national regenerative mission, exerting functions, carrying out tasks, occupying positions that were strange to medicine,” and disseminating the certainty “[…] of being able to end the blemishes of the nation, collaborating with Brazil's administrative and social entirety” ( Mota, 2003 , p. 21).

From the start of the community transmission of Sars-CoV-2 in Brazil it is possible to observe this memory of eugenics in Bolsonaro's denialism, especially in his defense of vertical isolation. As governors and mayors began to officially order social distancing, the president's position became more and more radical. This is what can be surmised from the article “Bolsonaro once again minimizes COVID-19 and says that Health is studying vertical isolation 19 ,” published on the financial news site IstoÉ Dinheiro on March 26. In this piece, the president once again says that “ some governors and mayors erred in the dose” of containment measures, demanding the reopening of all sectors of the economy:

“ And do a stay-at-home campaign. Don't let grandpa leave the house, leave him in a corner. When you get home have a shower, wash your hands, wipe your ears with sanitizer gel. That's it”, he declared .

In the excerpt, Bolsonaro dehumanizes the elderly, the main target for his strategy of vertical isolation, turning their existence into objects in face of the epidemic. In his ambition to maintain the capitalist order, the president treats this subject (the elderly) as objects without free will who must be segregated in a “corner,” removing “their individual, malleable, unique characteristics” and transforming them “into empty husks, representations of themselves who, apparently, are no longer covered by the State of right” ( Souza, 2017 , p. 70).

In the same article, when commenting on the critical situations in other countries and on the perspectives of how the disease would manifest in Brazil, Bolsonaro yet again invests in a rhetoric of dehumanization:

“ I don't think it's going to reach that point, even because Brazilians should be studied, they don't catch anything. You see the guy leaping into sewage, coming out, diving in and nothing happens” .

This speech speaks directly of the more vulnerable social classes in Brazil that, due to conditions of extreme poverty, are subject to extremely precarious production relations. In this manner, it is possible to identify in the president's discourse a correlation between men and rats, who are immune to sewers. This perspective, in turn, bears a resemblance to the metaphor of the crab man, created by doctor and geographer Josué de Castro to designate a new species of Brazilians: those excluded from the production processes and who took their subsistence from the mangrove swamps of Recife, mixing them up with the crabs they fed upon 20 . Later, in the 1990s, following on the heels of the crab men, the gabiru men emerged. This hyperbole was used to designate country folk who lost their lands to large-scale farming and ended up in urban shantytowns, carrying with them an old acquaintance, hunger ( Portella et al., 1992 ; de Melo Filho, 2003 ). From the Tupi wa'wiru , gabiru means that which devours supplies, lives off trash, begs for hand-outs, causes repugnance, attacks and steals ( Portella et al., 1992 ).

Besides touching upon this social imaginary of the excluded Brazilian, the speech is evidence of a reading in which the population can be left to their own luck, without needing the actions of a protective State since they are, by their animalistic nature, survivors.

In addition to the theoretical fragility of Bolsonaro's proposal, the news stories analyzed also demonstrate that the strategy was unfeasible due to Brazil's socioeconomic inequalities. In the article “Vertical isolation proposed by Bolsonaro may accelerate contagion by coronavirus and compromise health systems 21 ,” published on March 25 on the El País Brasil website, health specialists and medical authorities alert to the risks of accelerated contagion in Brazil and a rapidly compromised healthcare system:

“ The theoretical idea of vertical isolation is that you can allow young people to circulate. They would become infected and could become immune. But we don't know how this works with COVID-19 and we can't guarantee the exclusive isolation of a specific group”, alerts the doctor Valdes Bollela, professor at the School of Medicine of USP Ribeirão Preto [São Paulo University of Ribeiro Preto] . (…) You think you can separate all the people [in the risk groups] who are young from those who are over 60? (…) People with HIV, diabetes and the elderly who count on their families? I can't imagine that in real life. In a theoretical idea, it's possible. In practice, it's a trap (…) In Brazil, a lot of people depend exactly on the care of their children” .

On the isolation of the elderly, in an article published on March 25 on the CNN Brasil website, along with the previously mentioned press conference video, titled “Bolsonaro vai propor isolamento vertical para conter coronavírus 22 ,” other related opinions are mentioned:

[…] each family must be responsible for their relatives. “The people need to stop pushing things onto the public powers”, he stated. (…) He stressed that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, follows a “similar line” as to measures to contain the disease, referencing yesterday's speech by the North-American in which he intends to end quarantine in the USA “by Easter” .

In these excerpts, it is possible to observe Bolsonaro's contempt for the excluding social characteristics in Brazil, where extreme social inequality would make it impossible to completely isolate the elderly and those with comorbidities from their relatives. Additionally, this also indicates his positioning on two aspects: the first, in prioritizing the economy—what really matters is to keep people working and generating income and taxes; the second, in making the State exempt from the consequences of its omission regarding the risks that the elderly face, in other words, that their life or death is not a problem of the public powers but of their families. Bolsonaro also uses the reference to the president of the United States in order to legitimize and strengthen his arguments and transmit the idea that there is a consensus between them regarding the pandemic, reinforcing the thesis that vertical isolation would be a viable strategy, since it was adopted by a developed country.

The article is short and uses a neutral tone, but it refers to a number of links, informing us, among other things, that Bolsonaro was the target of protests by Brazilians who were maintaining social distancing and of criticism by politicians:

The speech [referring to the press conference video posted at the start of the article and already mentioned in this analysis] — during which there were records of pot-banging protests in several of the country's capitals — gave rise to criticism by health secretaries, authorities and politicians (CNN Brasil, March 25).

The website brings visibility to the president's speeches without the concern of reflecting upon them or of pointing out their damaging effects upon the population's health.

In the article “Bolsonaro defende isolamento vertical e sugere que país pode 'sair da normalidade democrática 23 ,”' produced by international news agency Ansa and published on the website of the O Globo newspaper (March 25), the president also makes what can be considered his first threat of democratic rupture, using the argument that measures of social distancing would provoke an economic crisis of enormous proportions, which could lead to social convulsions.

“ […] what happened in Chile [street movement that left its mark upon the Chilean scenario for months] will be small change next to what could happen in Brazil. We will all pay a price that will take years to pay, that is, if Brazil might not yet leave the democratic normality that you all defend so much, no one knows what can happen in Brazil” (…) “The chaos makes it so the left can seize the moment to come to power.”

By treating a scientifically legitimized event—the existence of an epidemic with planetary proportions—as an “excuse” of the Brazilian left to take his power, Bolsonaro brings up a fourth element that is characteristic of denialism: the identification of conspiracies among the consensuses of science. For conspiracy theorists, the validation of science is not a result of an evidence-based consensus among scientists, but of the involvement of these scientists in a complex and secret conspiracy ( Hoofnagle and Hoofnagle, 2007 ). In this sense, the process of peer revision “[…] is seen as a tool by which the conspirators suppress dissent, rather than as a means of weeding out papers and grant applications unsupported by evidence or lacking logical thought” ( Diethelm and McKee, 2009 ).

“So What?”: Considerations on a Eugenics Discourse

Denialism has different motivations—economic, political, personal, ideological, or religious—, but has as a common point the rejection of any thesis incompatible with the fundamental beliefs of those who hold them. As the analyses demonstrate, a first dimension of the denialism of Jair Bolsonaro on the Sars-Cov-2 epidemic is based on the idea that the effects of an economic crisis would be worse than the severe consequences of the disease itself on people's lives. As seen in this work, this discourse aligns with that of other denialist world leaders, such as President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson —although, different from the Brazilian president, these leaders have oscillated throughout the pandemic between accepting scientific arguments in favor of the population's health and prioritizing the economy.

In terms of the economic argument, however, a second dimension emerges in Bolsonaro's discourse: that of eugenics. Under the terminology of vertical isolation, naturalized and legitimized by the media, the Brazilian president turns the most vulnerable segment of the population into objects, establishing a moral compass according to which, faced with the needs of maintaining the relations of capitalist production, some lives are worth less than others, and that this would be enough to justify the sacrifice.

It is important to point out that this discursive posture is not casual or chaotic. There is a method here that, moreover, helped to elect Bolsonaro 24 , known for his racist, misogynistic, sexist, and xenophobic statements. In 2017, during the electoral campaign for presidency, the then parliamentary member promised to end all demarcation of land for Indigenous Peoples 25 : “You can be certain that, if I get there (…) There will not be a centimeter marked off for indigenous reservations or for quilombola 26 lands.”

At the same event, he made disparaging and fat-shaming comments: “I went to a quilombo. The lightest Afro-descendent there weighed seven arrobas (arroba is a measurement used to weigh cattle; one arroba is equivalent to 15 kg). They do nothing. I think he was of no use even to serve for breeding.” Ironically, this speech, which drew laughter from the audience, was given at Hebraica in Rio de Janeiro, one of the most traditional Jewish associations in the country.

In the wake of the rise of right-wing populism that, in the last years, has benefitted other leaders around the world, Bolsonaro was elected for his antisystem rhetoric, exploiting the fears and prejudices of ordinary voters, undermining the credibility of traditional political parties and democratic institutions, and normalizing discriminatory discourse, thanks to the reach of his social media, which he and his group manage with mastery, and with advisory help from Steve Bannon, former vice-president of Cambridge Analytica ( Ricard and Medeiros, 2020 ). When he took over the presidency of the Republic, in January 2019, he not only radicalized this rhetoric but also, in many cases, transformed it into State policy—in the first days of his government, he ended social and environmental protection structures and programs; under Bolsonaro, for example, the recognition of quilombos fell to the lowest levels in history 27 .

On March 18, in an interview to Fox News 28 during an official visit to the United States, Bolsonaro attacked immigrants by defending Trump's plans to build a wall on the border between the USA and Mexico: “The majority of immigrants do not have good intentions and do not want to do good for Americans.” It is worth remembering that there are over a million Brazilians living in the USA. In this manner, the alignment of Bolsonaro's migratory policies with those of the American president—who in December 2019 called Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries “shitholes”—indicates “a racist slant, since not by chance most immigrants are Black or Indigenous people, from countries with a non-white populational majority. There is a logic that is eugenic, racist, and ethnic in nature,” states Dennis Oliveira in the same article—a journalism professor from the University of São Paulo (USP) and an activist in the Rede Quilombação network.

As the Brazilian health crisis grew in severity, Bolsonaro's eugenics slant became more explicit, until it reached an emblematic declaration: “So what? I'm sorry. What do you want me to do? I'm a Messiah, but I don't do miracles 29 .” Spoken to a group of reporters and supporters in front of the Alvorada Palace, the presidential residence in Brasília, on the night of April 28, when Brazil hit 5,017 official deaths, the phrase was followed by a disturbing statement on the severity of COVID-19 among the elderly: “I regret the situation we are going through with the virus. We sympathize with the families who have lost their loved ones, who were mostly elderly. But such is life. Tomorrow it will be me [to die].”

The numbers for the epidemic in Brazil indicate that the eugenics project is succeeding, since on June 5, CNN informed that 40% more Black than white people die from COVID-19 in Brazil 30 . Although the country did not officially adopt the vertical isolation policy proposed by Bolsonaro, because the Supreme Court decreed that states and municipalities had the autonomy to adopt social distancing measures, Bolsonaro's government continued to boycott the actions of governors and mayors to contain dissemination of the virus. This boycott could be observed in the presidential decrees that increased the list of activities considered essential, in the delays and inefficiency in implementing financial aid to those who were left without income, in the absence of effective programs to subsidize small businesses, and, of course, in Bolsonaro's speeches, which resonated throughout the country both by means of mass media and social networks 31 .

Up until the conclusion of this article, the Ministry of Health was still under the interim command of a general who, like Bolsonaro, also adopted a denialist stance. On May 20, under this administration, the ministry published a protocol 32 with guidelines for prescribing chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for light, moderate, and severe cases of COVID-19. Although there is no strong scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this medication, the Bolsonaro administration maintains its use as a standard for care in SUS. Since the start of June 33 , the government has been changing the manner and time for divulging the epidemiological reports that update infection cases and deaths by the disease, while also announcing the adoption of a new methodology for sharing the data which will invalidate comparisons with the previous numbers and, consequently, affect monitoring of the evolution of COVID-19 in the country. One of the aims of this strategy is to reduce the visibility of the number of deaths and misinform the population. Following the same direction, the Department of Social Communication created a “life scoreboard,” a report disseminated exclusively on the presidency's social networks that highlights the number of recovery cases while omitting the deaths.

In addition to these actions, the president's denialist speeches that are spread both by mass media and social networks have a direct effect upon the behavior of the population regarding social distancing, as demonstrated by Ajzenman et al. (2020) .

In this scenario, our study demonstrates that the Brazilian mass media is still fixed upon the notion that it is necessary to present both sides of an event, giving each equal weight, even when one has assumed a denialist position toward the science. This positioning, justified normally by the pursuit of neutrality in news coverage, allows for the spreading of false premises posing as science and strengthens the denialist and eugenist project of Bolsonaro. This occurs because, as stated by Happer and Philo (2013) , the media holds a central role in spreading information and in the process of focusing attention on a specific subject, as well as in defining a public agenda.

Another aspect identified in the study relates to the characteristics of the method adopted by Bolsonaro since the elections, which have endured during this past year-and-a-half of his mandate: the discursive verbiage, often grotesque and always of populist appeal, which the Brazilian media appears to have become a hostage of. And, by amplifying the president's speeches, the media symbolically places him at the center of the coordination of control measures for the epidemic in Brazil, a role he has never undertaken. In this sense, we agree with Rosen (2020) and Smith (2020) , who identified the same phenomenon in the media coverage of coronavirus in the United States, pointing to the need of removing President Trump as a protagonist in news about the theme.

Under the guise of conclusion, it is important to highlight an action which indicates that the Brazilian press has gradually taken on a more critical posture. In June, faced with the proposal from the Ministry of Health for presenting incomplete data on COVID-19, the six largest newspapers and news sites in the country united in order to compile and systematize daily the data from the State Departments of Health 34 , ensuring a higher reliability and transparency of the numbers, thus acting as overseers for the public powers and guaranteeing the dissemination of correct information. However, in a health crisis with the magnitude of the present one, much more is necessary than merely making numbers visible. Newspapers and news sites have a key role, since the information they produce and circulate guide collective and individual behaviors ( Stevens and Hornik, 2014 ). Therefore, it is crucial that journalists take on a critical posture, knowing how to identify the multiple faces of denialism and making clear the damaging effects of eugenics policies upon the health of the population.

Data Availability Statement

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. All the articles/data used in the research are listed in the footnotes and are open access.

Author Contributions

CM and JB contributed to the design and implementation of the research, to the analysis of the results, and to the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

1. ^ Daily map of Johns Hopkins University and Medicine. Available at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html .

2. ^ Carried out in partnership between the RSF and the Intervozes collective, MOM-Brasil was the 11th study throughout the world and also the largest—up until 2017, the number of vehicles investigated had reached at the most 40. Available at: http://brazil.mom-rsf.org/br/ .

3. ^ Available at: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-06-25/nem-o-pior-ministro-da-saude-fez-o-que-exercito-esta-fazendo-desmontando-a-engrenagem-do-sus.html .

4. ^ “What is ‘group immunity,' the polemical strategy of the United Kingdom to combat coronavirus.” Available at: https://noticias.uol.com.br/saude/ultimas-noticias/bbc/2020/03/16/o-que-e-a-imunidade-de-grupo-a-polemica-estrategia-do-reino-unido-para-combater-coronavirus.htm .

5. ^ “Coronavirus: must almost everyone catch it to end the pandemic?” Available at: https://saude.abril.com.br/blog/cientistas-explicam/coronavirus-quase-todo-mundo-tem-que-pegar-para-a-pandemia-passar/ .

6. ^ “Who is immune to coronavirus?” Available at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/equilibrioesaude/2020/04/quem-e-imune-ao-coronavirus.shtml .

7. ^ “Specialists recommend herd immunity for poor countries.” Available at: https://economia.uol.com.br/noticias/bloomberg/2020/04/22/especialistas-recomendam-imunidade-de-rebanho-para-paises-pobres.htm .

8. ^ “Coronavirus pandemic: the best scenario is disastrous.” Available at: https://agazetadoacre.com/2020/03/pandemia-de-coronavirus-o-melhor-cenario-e-desastroso/ .

9. ^ “Epidemiologist opposes Osmar Terra and sees Brazil as far from the end of the epidemic.” Available at: https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/04/14/brasil-esta-longe-do-final-da-epidemia-e-de-imunizacao-diz-epidemiologista.htm .

10. ^ Doctor, former Health Secretary of Rio Grande do Sul and former minister for presidents Michel Temer (who took over the presidency of the Republic in 2016, after the parliamentary coup against president Dilma Rousseff) and for Bolsonaro himself, Terra had participated, the day before, in a debate on the epidemic promoted by UOL, one of the largest news sites in the country. Available at: https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2020/04/13/governistas-criticam-isolamento-e-minimizam-briga-bolsonaro-x-mandetta.htm .

11. ^ Available at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2020/05/deputados-divulgam-fake-news-sobre-coronavirus-para-ecoar-discurso-de-bolsonaro.shtml .

12. ^ Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy9dqEsjkVk .

13. ^ Link to the pronouncement.

14. ^ After 7m14s. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=vp3A_8vywC0 .

15. ^ The president of the True Health Initiative and director-founder of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center.

16. ^ “What is the vertical isolation that Bolsonaro wants and why do specialists fear it will cause more deaths?” Available at: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-52043112 .

17. ^ “Why is vertical isolation seen with skepticism?” Available at: https://saude.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,por-que-isolamento-vertical-e-visto-com-ceticismo,70003252797 .

18. ^ The titles of the articles (descriptor 3): What is vertical isolation against coronavirus; What is the vertical isolation that Bolsonaro wants and why do specialists fear it will cause more deaths?; Does vertical isolation work? Reality has already answered that question, says doctor; What is vertical isolation and why it may not work; What is vertical isolation [and why this may not be a good idea)?]; What is vertical isolation (and why this is not a good idea)? Horizontal vs. vertical isolation: know the pros and cons of the strategies to contain coronavirus; Health alerts to rash transition, but sees vertical isolation as possible in little-affected locations; and, What are the risks of adopting only vertical isolation, proposed by Bolsonaro; What is the vertical isolation that Bolsonaro wants and why do specialists fear it will cause more deaths?; Specialists: Brazil's characteristics do not permit vertical isolation; Health alerts to rash transition, but sees vertical isolation as possible in little-affected locations; Turkey endures drastic consequences of vertical isolation.

19. ^ Bolsonaro once again minimizes COVID-19 and says that Health is studying vertical isolation. Available at: https://www.istoedinheiro.com.br/bolsonaro-volta-a-minimizar-COVID-19-e-diz-que-saude-estuda-isolamento-vertical/ .

20. ^ The notion of the crab men emerged from the main works of Josué de Castro: Geografia da fome (1948), Geopol í tica da fome (1951), Documentário do Nordeste (1957), Fatores de localização da cidade do Recife (1957), and Homens e caranguejos (1967), the last an autobiographical romance.

21. ^ “Vertical isolation proposed by Bolsonaro may accelerate contagion by coronavirus and compromise health systems.” Available at: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-03-25/isolamento-vertical-proposto-por-bolsonaro-pode-acelerar-contagios-por-coronavirus-e-comprometer-sistema-de-saude.html .

22. ^ “Bolsonaro will propose vertical isolation to contain coronavirus.” Available at: https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/2020/03/25/bolsonaro-nao-estou-preocupado-com-a-minha-popularidade .

23. ^ “Bolsonaro defends vertical isolation and suggests the country may ‘depart from democratic normality.”' Available at: https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/bolsonaro-defende-isolamento-vertical-sugere-que-pais-pode-sair-da-normalidade-democratica-24327038 .

24. ^ After retiring as a captain of the Brazilian Army at the age of 33, Bolsonaro has been a professional politician for over 30 years. Before becoming president, he was on the Rio de Janeiro city council and, later, was a federal congressman for 27 years. During that period, he presented only two draft bills.

25. ^ Available at: https://veja.abril.com.br/brasil/bolsonaro-e-acusado-de-racismo-por-frase-em-palestra-na-hebraica/ .

26. ^ Quilombo are settlements first established by escaped slaves in Brazil. Quilombolas are the descendants of Afro-Brazilian slaves who escaped from slave plantations that existed in Brazil until abolition in 1888. Since 2003 the Decreto 4.887/2003,recognized Quilombo communities and their claims to the land they inhabited, but only 219 of the 2,926 Quilombos have land titles.

27. ^ Available at: https://www.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/2020/06/23/sob-bolsonaro-reconhecimento-de-quilombolas-cai-ao-menor-patamar-da-historia.htm .

28. ^ Available at: https://ponte.org/eugenia-2-0-a-politica-migratoria-de-bolsonaro/ .

29. ^ Available at: https://veja.abril.com.br/politica/e-dai-nao-faco-milagres-diz-bolsonaro-sobre-mortes-por-COVID-19/ .

30. ^ Available at: https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/2020/06/05/negros-morrem-40-mais-que-brancos-por-coronavirus-no-brasil .

31. ^ Available at: https://www.huffpostbrasil.com/entry/mortes-COVID-19-25-junho_br_5ef4b64cc5b66c3126832ef9 .

32. ^ Available at: https://www.saude.gov.br/images/pdf/2020/May/20/orientacoes-manuseio-medicamentoso-covid19.pdf .

33. ^ To read further, see: “ https://www.huffpostbrasil.com/entry/mortes-COVID-19-25-junho_br_5ef4b64cc5b66c3126832ef9 .

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Keywords: novel SARS-coronavirus-2/SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, digital media, eugenics, denialism, public health communication, journalism

Citation: Malinverni C and Brigagão JIM (2020) COVID-19: Scientific Arguments, Denialism, Eugenics, and the Construction of the Antisocial Distancing Discourse in Brazil. Front. Commun. 5:582963. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2020.582963

Received: 13 July 2020; Accepted: 30 September 2020; Published: 04 November 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Malinverni and Brigagão. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Claudia Malinverni, claudia.malinverni@usp.br ; Jacqueline Isaac Machado Brigagão, jac@usp.br

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Here are the steps to help you write a persuasive essay on this topic, along with an example essay:

Step 1: Choose a Specific Thesis Statement

Your thesis statement should clearly state your position on a specific aspect of COVID-19. It should be debatable and clear. For example:

"COVID-19 vaccination mandates are necessary for public health and safety."

Step 2: Research and Gather Information

Collect reliable and up-to-date information from reputable sources to support your thesis statement. This may include statistics, expert opinions, and scientific studies. For instance:

COVID-19 vaccination effectiveness data
Information on vaccine mandates in different countries
Expert statements from health organizations like the WHO or CDC

Step 3: Outline Your Essay

Create a clear and organized outline to structure your essay. A persuasive essay typically follows this structure:

Introduction
Background Information
Body Paragraphs (with supporting evidence)
Counterarguments (addressing opposing views)

Step 4: Write the Introduction

In the introduction, grab your reader's attention and present your thesis statement. For example:

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an unprecedented global challenge, and in the face of this crisis, many countries have debated the implementation of vaccination mandates. This essay argues that such mandates are essential for safeguarding public health and preventing further devastation caused by the virus.

Step 5: Provide Background Information

Offer context and background information to help your readers understand the issue better. For instance:

COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, emerged in late 2019 and quickly spread worldwide, leading to millions of infections and deaths. Vaccination has proven to be an effective tool in curbing the virus's spread and severity.

Step 6: Develop Body Paragraphs

Each body paragraph should present a single point or piece of evidence that supports your thesis statement. Use clear topic sentences , evidence, and analysis. Here's an example:

One compelling reason for implementing COVID-19 vaccination mandates is the overwhelming evidence of vaccine effectiveness. According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines demonstrated an efficacy of over 90% in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 cases. This level of protection not only reduces the risk of infection but also minimizes the virus's impact on healthcare systems.

Step 7: Address Counterarguments

Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and refute them with strong counterarguments. This demonstrates that you've considered different perspectives. For example:

Some argue that vaccination mandates infringe on personal freedoms and autonomy. While individual freedom is a crucial aspect of democratic societies, public health measures have long been implemented to protect the collective well-being. Seatbelt laws, for example, are in place to save lives, even though they restrict personal choice.

Step 8: Write the Conclusion

Summarize your main points and restate your thesis statement in the conclusion. End with a strong call to action or thought-provoking statement. For instance:

In conclusion, COVID-19 vaccination mandates are a crucial step toward controlling the pandemic, protecting public health, and preventing further loss of life. The evidence overwhelmingly supports their effectiveness, and while concerns about personal freedoms are valid, they must be weighed against the greater good of society. It is our responsibility to take collective action to combat this global crisis and move toward a safer, healthier future.

Step 9: Revise and Proofread

Edit your essay for clarity, coherence, grammar, and spelling errors. Ensure that your argument flows logically.

Step 10: Cite Your Sources

Include proper citations and a bibliography page to give credit to your sources.

Remember to adjust your approach and arguments based on your target audience and the specific angle you want to take in your persuasive essay about COVID-19.

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Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19

When writing a persuasive essay about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s important to consider how you want to present your argument. To help you get started, here are some example essays for you to read:

Here is another example explaining How COVID-19 has changed our lives essay:

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in late 2019, has drastically altered the way we live. From work and education to social interactions and healthcare, every aspect of our daily routines has been impacted. Reflecting on these changes helps us understand their long-term implications.

COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is an infectious disease first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. It spreads through respiratory droplets and can range from mild symptoms like fever and cough to severe cases causing pneumonia and death. The rapid spread and severe health impacts have led to significant public health measures worldwide.

The pandemic shifted many to remote work and online education. While some enjoy the flexibility, others face challenges like limited access to technology and blurred boundaries between work and home.

Social distancing and lockdowns have led to increased isolation and mental health issues. However, the pandemic has also fostered community resilience, with people finding new ways to connect and support each other virtually.

Healthcare systems have faced significant challenges, leading to innovations in telemedicine and a focus on public health infrastructure. Heightened awareness of hygiene practices, like handwashing and mask-wearing, has helped reduce the spread of infectious diseases.

COVID-19 has caused severe economic repercussions, including business closures and job losses. While governments have implemented relief measures, the long-term effects are still uncertain. The pandemic has also accelerated trends like e-commerce and contactless payments.

The reduction in travel and industrial activities during lockdowns led to a temporary decrease in pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. This has sparked discussions about sustainable practices and the potential for a green recovery.

COVID-19 has reshaped our lives in numerous ways, affecting work, education, social interactions, healthcare, the economy, and the environment. As we adapt to this new normal, it is crucial to learn from these experiences and work towards a more resilient and equitable future.

Let’s look at another sample essay:

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a transformative event, reshaping every aspect of our lives. In my opinion, while the pandemic has brought immense challenges, it has also offered valuable lessons and opportunities for growth.

One of the most striking impacts has been on our healthcare systems. The pandemic exposed weaknesses and gaps, prompting a much-needed emphasis on public health infrastructure and the importance of preparedness. Innovations in telemedicine and vaccine development have been accelerated, showing the incredible potential of scientific collaboration.

Socially, the pandemic has highlighted the importance of community and human connection. While lockdowns and social distancing measures increased feelings of isolation, they also fostered a sense of solidarity. People found creative ways to stay connected and support each other, from virtual gatherings to community aid initiatives.

The shift to remote work and online education has been another significant change. This transition, though challenging, demonstrated the flexibility and adaptability of both individuals and organizations. It also underscored the importance of digital literacy and access to technology.

Economically, the pandemic has caused widespread disruption. Many businesses closed, and millions lost their jobs. However, it also prompted a reevaluation of business models and work practices. The accelerated adoption of e-commerce and remote work could lead to more sustainable and efficient ways of operating in the future.

In conclusion, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a profound and complex event. While it brought about considerable hardship, it also revealed the strength and resilience of individuals and communities. Moving forward, it is crucial to build on the lessons learned to create a more resilient and equitable world.

Check out some more PDF examples below:

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Pandemic

Sample Of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 In The Philippines - Example

If you're in search of a compelling persuasive essay on business, don't miss out on our “ persuasive essay about business ” blog!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19 Vaccine

Covid19 vaccines are one of the ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but they have been a source of controversy. Different sides argue about the benefits or dangers of the new vaccines. Whatever your point of view is, writing a persuasive essay about it is a good way of organizing your thoughts and persuading others.

A persuasive essay about the COVID-19 vaccine could consider the benefits of getting vaccinated as well as the potential side effects.

Below are some examples of persuasive essays on getting vaccinated for Covid-19.

Covid19 Vaccine Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay on Covid Vaccines

Interested in thought-provoking discussions on abortion? Read our persuasive essay about abortion blog to eplore arguments!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About COVID-19 Integration

Covid19 has drastically changed the way people interact in schools, markets, and workplaces. In short, it has affected all aspects of life. However, people have started to learn to live with Covid19.

Writing a persuasive essay about it shouldn't be stressful. Read the sample essay below to get an idea for your own essay about Covid19 integration.

Persuasive Essay About Working From Home During Covid19

Searching for the topic of Online Education? Our persuasive essay about online education is a must-read.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Covid 19

Covid-19 has been an ever-evolving issue, with new developments and discoveries being made on a daily basis.

Writing an argumentative essay about such an issue is both interesting and challenging. It allows you to evaluate different aspects of the pandemic, as well as consider potential solutions.

Here are some examples of argumentative essays on Covid19.

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 Sample

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 With Introduction Body and Conclusion

Looking for a persuasive take on the topic of smoking? You'll find it all related arguments in out Persuasive Essay About Smoking blog!

Examples of Persuasive Speeches About Covid-19

Do you need to prepare a speech about Covid19 and need examples? We have them for you!

Persuasive speeches about Covid-19 can provide the audience with valuable insights on how to best handle the pandemic. They can be used to advocate for specific changes in policies or simply raise awareness about the virus.

Check out some examples of persuasive speeches on Covid-19:

Persuasive Speech About Covid-19 Example

Persuasive Speech About Vaccine For Covid-19

You can also read persuasive essay examples on other topics to master your persuasive techniques!

Tips to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Writing a persuasive essay about COVID-19 requires a thoughtful approach to present your arguments effectively.

Here are some tips to help you craft a compelling persuasive essay on this topic:

Choose a Specific Angle: Narrow your focus to a specific aspect of COVID-19, like vaccination or public health measures.
Provide Credible Sources: Support your arguments with reliable sources like scientific studies and government reports.
Use Persuasive Language: Employ ethos, pathos, and logos , and use vivid examples to make your points relatable.
Organize Your Essay: Create a solid persuasive essay outline and ensure a logical flow, with each paragraph focusing on a single point.
Emphasize Benefits: Highlight how your suggestions can improve public health, safety, or well-being.
Use Visuals: Incorporate graphs, charts, and statistics to reinforce your arguments.
Call to Action: End your essay conclusion with a strong call to action, encouraging readers to take a specific step.
Revise and Edit: Proofread for grammar, spelling, and clarity, ensuring smooth writing flow.
Seek Feedback: Have someone else review your essay for valuable insights and improvements.

Tough Essay Due? Hire Tough Writers!

Common Topics for a Persuasive Essay on COVID-19

Here are some persuasive essay topics on COVID-19:

The Importance of Vaccination Mandates for COVID-19 Control
Balancing Public Health and Personal Freedom During a Pandemic
The Economic Impact of Lockdowns vs. Public Health Benefits
The Role of Misinformation in Fueling Vaccine Hesitancy
Remote Learning vs. In-Person Education: What's Best for Students?
The Ethics of Vaccine Distribution: Prioritizing Vulnerable Populations
The Mental Health Crisis Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Long-Term Effects of COVID-19 on Healthcare Systems
Global Cooperation vs. Vaccine Nationalism in Fighting the Pandemic
The Future of Telemedicine: Expanding Healthcare Access Post-COVID-19

In search of more inspiring topics for your next persuasive essay? Our persuasive essay topics blog has plenty of ideas!

To sum it up,

You have read good sample essays and got some helpful tips. You now have the tools you needed to write a persuasive essay about Covid-19. So don't let the doubts stop you, start writing!

If you need professional writing help, don't worry! We've got that for you as well.

MyPerfectWords.com is a professional persuasive essay writing service that can help you craft an excellent persuasive essay on Covid-19. Our experienced essay writer will create a well-structured, insightful paper in no time!

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good title for a covid-19 essay.

A good title for a COVID-19 essay should be clear, engaging, and reflective of the essay's content. Examples include:

"The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Health"
"How COVID-19 Has Transformed Our Daily Lives"
"COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Future Implications"

How do I write an informative essay about COVID-19?

To write an informative essay about COVID-19, follow these steps:

Choose a specific focus: Select a particular aspect of COVID-19, such as its transmission, symptoms, or vaccines.
Research thoroughly: Gather information from credible sources like scientific journals and official health organizations.
Organize your content: Structure your essay with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
Present facts clearly: Use clear, concise language to convey information accurately.
Include visuals: Use charts or graphs to illustrate data and make your essay more engaging.

How do I write an expository essay about COVID-19?

To write an expository essay about COVID-19, follow these steps:

Select a clear topic: Focus on a specific question or issue related to COVID-19.
Conduct thorough research: Use reliable sources to gather information.
Create an outline: Organize your essay with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
Explain the topic: Use facts and examples to explain the chosen aspect of COVID-19 in detail.
Maintain objectivity: Present information in a neutral and unbiased manner.
Edit and revise: Proofread your essay for clarity, coherence, and accuracy.

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In Their Own Words, Americans Describe the Struggles and Silver Linings of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak has dramatically changed americans’ lives and relationships over the past year. we asked people to tell us about their experiences – good and bad – in living through this moment in history..

Pew Research Center has been asking survey questions over the past year about Americans’ views and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. In August, we gave the public a chance to tell us in their own words how the pandemic has affected them in their personal lives. We wanted to let them tell us how their lives have become more difficult or challenging, and we also asked about any unexpectedly positive events that might have happened during that time.

The vast majority of Americans (89%) mentioned at least one negative change in their own lives, while a smaller share (though still a 73% majority) mentioned at least one unexpected upside. Most have experienced these negative impacts and silver linings simultaneously: Two-thirds (67%) of Americans mentioned at least one negative and at least one positive change since the pandemic began.

For this analysis, we surveyed 9,220 U.S. adults between Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Respondents to the survey were asked to describe in their own words how their lives have been difficult or challenging since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, and to describe any positive aspects of the situation they have personally experienced as well. Overall, 84% of respondents provided an answer to one or both of the questions. The Center then categorized a random sample of 4,071 of their answers using a combination of in-house human coders, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service and keyword-based pattern matching. The full methodology and questions used in this analysis can be found here.

In many ways, the negatives clearly outweigh the positives – an unsurprising reaction to a pandemic that had killed more than 180,000 Americans at the time the survey was conducted. Across every major aspect of life mentioned in these responses, a larger share mentioned a negative impact than mentioned an unexpected upside. Americans also described the negative aspects of the pandemic in greater detail: On average, negative responses were longer than positive ones (27 vs. 19 words). But for all the difficulties and challenges of the pandemic, a majority of Americans were able to think of at least one silver lining.

Both the negative and positive impacts described in these responses cover many aspects of life, none of which were mentioned by a majority of Americans. Instead, the responses reveal a pandemic that has affected Americans’ lives in a variety of ways, of which there is no “typical” experience. Indeed, not all groups seem to have experienced the pandemic equally. For instance, younger and more educated Americans were more likely to mention silver linings, while women were more likely than men to mention challenges or difficulties.

Here are some direct quotes that reveal how Americans are processing the new reality that has upended life across the country.

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Guest Essay

Pandemic Pantries in the Streets? You Communist!

By Glenn Diaz

Mr. Diaz is a writer based in Manila. His second novel, “Yñiga,” about the spate of political killings in the Philippines in the 2000s, was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize.

MANILA — The day the city went back into a hard lockdown in late March, I started a ritual: Trapped again, I took to counting the ambulance sirens I’d hear from my place in Quezon City, the most populous area of this sprawling capital. At one point, blare after dystopian blare came every 20 minutes or so.

The confirmed Covid-19 case total in the Philippines breached the one million mark in late April. New daily cases were averaging about 7,700 this week, down from a peak of about 10,800 in mid-April, but that’s still considerably more than the previous high of about 4,400 in late August. And the Department of Health warned recently that the situation could quickly worsen again and the Philippines could face the “big possibility” of an “India-like” catastrophe.

Dire superlatives limn the costs of the state’s neglect. Figures for infections and deaths per capita in the Philippines are now the worst in Southeast Asia. The economic downturn here has been the steepest in the region . The country faces the most sluggish economic recovery .

I started counting sirens out of helplessness and rage; it was a desperate attempt to get a handle on what is really happening on the ground, given competing accounts and confounding official policies.

At the height of the recent surge, the government claimed that around 14 percent of beds in intensive care units in Metro Manila were still available , even as social media feeds were flooded with calls for help and stories of patients being taken to facilities four or five hours away because of long waiting lists.

The health care system is buckling after decades of austerity and privatization . But more than anything, the culprit is the Duterte administration’s penchant for solutions anchored in brute force and draconian control rather than science and concern for the public’s welfare.

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

by Alissa Wilkinson

The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

The Vox guide to navigating the coronavirus crisis

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

A syllabus for the end of the world

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

What day is it today?

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

Vox is starting a book club. Come read with us!

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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The complexity of managing COVID-19: How important is good ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacy of public health systems worldwide, casting a shadow that we could not have imagined even a year ago. As the fog of confusion lifts and we begin to ...
The World in Crisis: Government Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic
The paper looks at a variety of factors, including the strength of a country's democracy, freedom of its press and trust in its government, to investigate how those factors affect a country's COVID-19 response. The researchers found that when it comes to a crisis, not all institutions are created equal.
How Governments Respond to Pandemics Like the Coronavirus
Isaac Chotiner speaks with Sir Richard J. Evans, the provost of Gresham College, in London, on how governments' have responded to pandemics such as the Black Plague and cholera through history.
Here's Everything the Federal Government Has Done to Respond to the
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a severe public health crisis as well as substantial economic disruption for every American. So far, lawmakers have enacted six major bills, costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Below is a recap of that legislation.
Essay: COVID-19 and humanity's interconnectedness
Before the pandemic, I had often heard adults say that young people would lose the ability to connect in-person with others due to our growing dependence on technology and social media. ... we respect the government's effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus. In the meantime, we can find creative ways to stay connected and continue to ...
How Well Do They Manage a Crisis? The Government's Effectiveness During
Abstract. The COVID‐19 pandemic clearly highlighted the importance of effective crisis management and its relationship with citizens' willingness to cooperate with the government in such turbulent times. We develop a theory and hypotheses about the impact of citizens' experiences on their perceptions of the government's effectiveness during ...
Effects of government policies on the spread of COVID-19 worldwide
Introduction. The spread of coronavirus disease 1 in 2019 (COVID-19) became a global threat and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 2. As of January ...
Efficiency in the governance of the Covid-19 pandemic: political and
The pandemic generated by Covid-19 has changed the way of life of citizens around the world in a short time, affecting all areas of society directly or indirectly, which is facing a global health crisis with different national responses implemented by governments. Several months into the pandemic, the first after-effects of Covid-19 are beginning to be felt by citizens, who are questioning the ...
Pandemics show us what government is for
Too much dependence on the private sector weakened pandemic response, argues Susan Erikson. Growth-at-any-cost economics has health costs, a reality the COVID-19 pandemic brings into sharp relief.
The impact of the government response on pandemic control in the long
Firstly, since the government response significantly affects the development of the pandemic, the government should improve the response level in the stage of case fatality rate increase. Secondly, the development of the pandemic tends to fluctuate periodically, and countries should be prepared to deal with COVID-19 in the long term.
Government in a pandemic: how coronavirus caused a dramatic shift in
Published: October 8, 2020 8:15am EDT. A Welsh high street tries to get shoppers to keep it one-way. PA/Ben Birchall. We've become used to having autonomy over health decisions, which is what ...
COVID-19 and its Impact: Seven Essays on Reframing Government
In re-framing government management and operations, this compendium of seven essays highlights several key themes:Changing the nature of work focuses on government jobs best suited to shift virtually, the new "workday," best practices, government as a model workplace, and workplace health, safety, and privacy.Reimagining how government delivers services and products to the
Coronavirus overview: How political ideology and governmental
The world is suffering the kind of pandemic that many experts (including those writing in the Bulletin) have long warned was all but bound to occur.Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, governments around the world—including, notably, the US federal government—failed to adequately prepare for today's pandemic and are therefore responding haplessly as COVID-19 spreads.
Gen Z: Government Ethics During This Time of Pandemic
The impacts of this pandemic are expected to have lasting marks on their lives, especially as many enter the workforce and adulthood. Here are some of the top issues related to government ethics that have arisen during the pandemic and are worth considering, especially for members of Generation Z. 1. Individual Freedom vs. Collective Action
Governments' Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic
Reprints & Permissions. View PDF View EPUB. "COVID-19" or "the pandemic" is often referred to as a "novel Coronavirus" because almost everything about it has been startlingly new - "novel.". When COVID-19 was first identified late in 2019, scientists around the globe knew almost nothing about it. The disease's origins ...
Efficiency in the governance of the Covid-19 pandemic: political and
Background. The pandemic generated by Covid-19 has changed the way of life of citizens around the world in a short time, affecting all areas of society directly or indirectly, which is facing a global health crisis with different national responses implemented by governments. Several months into the pandemic, the first after-effects of Covid-19 ...
COVID-19: Scientific Arguments, Denialism, Eugenics, and the
1 Faculty of Public Health's Audioteca Collection, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; 2 School of Arts Science and Humanities, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Since March 11, the world has been experiencing a pandemic of Sars-Cov-2, the new coronavirus, which emerged in China in late December 2019 and causes the COVID-19 disease.
Addressing the Climate Crisis in Times of Pandemic
Español. By Katharina Rall. While the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the news for much of 2020, climate change—the other global crisis threatening catastrophic impacts on peoples' lives—has ...
Persuasive Essay About Covid19
When writing a persuasive essay about the COVID-19 pandemic, it's important to consider how you want to present your argument. ... People around the world are dealing with enormous amounts of stress, anxiety, and worry as a result of the pandemic. ... Support your arguments with reliable sources like scientific studies and government reports ...
How the COVID-19 pandemic has changed Americans' personal lives
The outbreak has dramatically changed Americans' lives and relationships over the past year. We asked people to tell us about their experiences - good and bad - in living through this moment in history. Pew Research Center has been asking survey questions over the past year about Americans' views and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fighting Covid Poverty in the Philippines
At one point, blare after dystopian blare came every 20 minutes or so. The confirmed Covid-19 case total in the Philippines breached the one million mark in late April. New daily cases were ...
Covid 19 Essays: Examples, Topics, & Outlines
DOI: 10.1001/JAMA.2020.7308. The author discusses the economic and healthcare crisis the COVID-19 pandemic created. The projections drawn in the paper predict a 10 to 25% contraction of the US economy in the second quarter. The writer asserts that the United States has entered a COVID-19 recession.
12 moving essays about life during coronavirus
Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus. Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history. A woman wearing a face mask in Miami. Alissa Wilkinson ...

The complexity of managing COVID-19: How important is good governance?

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Government in a pandemic: how coronavirus caused a dramatic shift in our relationship with the state

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