How has the World Responded to COVID-19?
Photo Credit: Manoej Paateel / Shutterstock.com
By Noelle Woodward
As the effects of the global coronavirus pandemic die down here in the United States, in other countries, the surge is just beginning. In India, the daily case rate for the virus has risen from 15,000 new positives a day to over 400,000 in just two months, while the once newsworthy reports of China’s case count have been nearly eradicated.
The differing leadership stances under autocratic, authoritarian, and federal governments of India, China and the United States have led to completely different timeframes for the coronavirus outbreaks and contrasting plans of control and immunization.
In China, the origin of the outbreak, the government worked quickly in an attempt to lessen the impact, although with scarce knowledge early on, limiting the spread became increasingly difficult.
The Chinese government is largely centralized and authoritarian, creating a system in which, once restrictions were put in place, they were efficiently enacted everywhere and the government was able to impose onto its citizens' lives.
One restrictive feature, put in place in late 2020, is a QR code tracker. “You scan it and then you can get into places but if you aren't out of quarantine, or if you've been to suspicious areas or areas of danger, then your code will turn yellow or red, and then you won't be able to go anywhere,” says Kitty Zhan ‘21.
While the tracker has been largely successful and Covid cases have plummeted in China, the feature can frequently feel like an extreme invasion of privacy to some.
“It's scary, I can't say if it's worth it but I definitely know I would be super uncomfortable to wear that around,” says Zhan. “You just feel like there's a danger. Knowing that a government basically can track whatever you do, that's scary to me and it doesn't feel right. But it's effective. So, you know, up for debate.”
However, the tracker is just the tip of the iceberg for the Chinese government’s drastic measures taken to prevent COVID-19 for its citizens.
“They cut everything, [travel, transportation] off, because they didn't want it to expand to the country,” says Zhan. “That's good, big picture wise, but if you were someone in that moment, it definitely felt really desperate; you would feel like nobody has cared for you and nobody respects you as an individual. In a democratic government, it's harder to handle because of their respect for individual rights, but also, that doesn't allow them to uniformly issue one law that [puts] the entire country under control.”
The response differences between the United States and China are drastically different, proving how directly the governing styles impact both the autonomy and safety of its citizens and the cost of prioritizing one or the other.
“The Chinese government has way more control over the cities and just over each person than they do in the US,” Zhan adds. “So they were able to just kind of [eliminate Covid in China] because of how much control they had, but here you had to deal with it, you had to tell people to wear masks. In China, you could have been arrested if you didn't wear a mask right. So, it really is two sides.”
On the other side of the spectrum is India. Similar to China, India faced the pandemic with strict safety measures and drastic protocols early on, causing a complete shutdown of the Indian economy and consequently leaving many citizens stranded in crowded cities, far from their families with only a few hours notice. However, unlike China, India’s safety protocols were able to prevent a big spread early on and have lasted effectively up until a few months ago when everything seemed to fall apart.
“[In India they] don't have the same health system resources that European nations do,” says Marty Rubio, a world cultures and economics teacher at Athenian.
So when, Indian Covid guidelines were eventually lifted a few months ago and various COVID-19 variants made their way into the country, everything took a turn for the worse.
“There are so many people in India and the potential for that really growing and growing, is huge,” says Rubio.
Unlike both China and India, where there have been large outbreaks at either the beginning or the most current parts of the pandemic, the United States seems to have had a steady amount of cases both increasing and decreasing over the course of the last 14 months.
“In the United States we have a federal system where the states get to decide for themselves, and you have two political parties with generally different philosophical approaches to dealing with [Covid],” says Rubio. “We are just so politically divided, one side doesn't trust what the other side says no matter what it is, and so I think there's unfortunately just these decisions which should be really scientific, that have become politicized”
Some of these decisions, such as vaccinations, have fallen completely to the public’s individual choices, where despite the United States’ relative success in distributing vaccines, there is a large amount of variation in who is willing to accept it.
“It's sad because it's a failure of us to think collectively about each other, how do we take care of each other by our own personal choices,” adds Rubio. “The United States is a metaphor for internationalism, if you think of the individual states who have a lot of their own power what to do, that you have a whole lab that has all these different policies and responses that produce different outcomes.”
The almost consecutive peaks of the outbreaks in each country overlap just slightly, signaling how certain efforts to curtail the virus have achieved either success, both temporary and long lasting, as well as distinct failure. These differences ultimately raise the question: what is the government’s role in protecting its citizens from the COVID-19 outbreak and where is the line between too much involvement and not enough?
