Brief

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats in ‘The Second Coming’

 COVID has taken center stage globally. Previous crises, like climate change, immigration, terrorism, global inequality seem to have receded both in print and in the minds. Can we really make crisis appear and disappear at will?

The second interesting aspect of COVID is its global reach. Since the Second World War the world that was coming together, was at the start of this century, already rifting apart. In some ways COVID is a great global equalizer: it has created a common enemy and a common response. Yet at the same time, COVID, has also highlighted that despite the shared risks, our ability and willingness to work together is feeble, at best.

Consider the European Union project, free movement of people and goods is one of the key and sacrosanct ideals. Already with immigration and terrorism the first reflexes to return to national borders had emerged. COVID just took that instinct to a different level. Understandably movement of people is key to transmission of the virus. But should movement not be based on infection rates geographically rather than on national borders? Virus is so effective because it knows no borders, and yet our response is based on borders.

Instead of our normal concerns totally new concerns and language emerged in the wake of COVID. We became a planet in grip of numbers: mortality rates, infection rates, infection mortality rates, case mortality rates, testing rates, ICU beds occupancy rates, became part of common language. Websites aggregating numbers from global and national reporting organizations, became the most visited websites. And numbers got picked and dropped, twisted and tweaked to fit the temperament and need. Science proliferated and had a new obsession. Virologists obviously, but also mathematicians, physicists, sociologists, economists, historians many changed tracks and rushed to produce COVID research. In weeks and months following first COVID cases, non-peer reviewed articles started appearing in hundreds and thousands. It became humanly impossible to follow even a fraction of them. Most of us get our news from the media. Here too in the new world, google news became our source. And we became drowned in screaming headlines. Even quality journalism took a position and reported a biased and one-sided picture. It played to one side and irritated the others. When science itself was the culprit and the victim, media was bound to follow.

For those of us who are not number freaks, there were other issues to argue: social distancing norms, logic of masks, lockdowns, should we send or not send our children to school, should we self-isolate, how do we plan our weekly shopping, should I get self-tested, why are my neighbors so callous and irresponsible, will there be a hospital bed or ICU bed for me if I get sick, will they release my body for the final rites should I die, all these and many other issues became center-stage. We were, we still are obsessed.

It sometimes feels that we live on a planet of 8 billion scientists. Everybody has their pet or series of pet hypotheses. And these hypotheses have long gelled into convictions. And with so much uncertainty nobody for sure can say who is right or wrong. We have made a tunnel around ourselves, and the tunnel is the truth. To use Osterholm’s example of the sign he put in his backyard in Minnesota years ago, warning elephants not to trespass in his garden since it was poisoned for elephants. And remarkably no elephants have since been sighted in his garden. One can therefore conclude that the sign works. Or one could remember that there are no elephants in Minnesota to start with.

We have no convincing route to assess the impact of all the different measures undertaken to different degrees to contain spread of the virus around the world. It will take decades before these become clear. And yet we are all convinced in our own way, on the soundness of our approach. The other side is of course the impact of these measures on the society in general: on the wellbeing of people, on their health, on the economics, on their future. That too will take decades to become obvious, perhaps the reason that we tend to downplay them for now.

Gupta Strategists is a healthcare focused consulting company. What we aim to do with this project is not so much to focus on the COVID side healthcare (the ‘Virus’ knows that there is more than enough focus on it already!), but importantly on the impact of COVID beyond healthcare itself. We take a global perspective because COVID has been both a globally converging and a diverging agent. We have chosen six countries because of their diversity of response to COVID as well as the diversity of the impact of COVID on their societies. Through this project we intend to showcase both what is uncommon but also what is common.

In this project we explore through pictures and numbers, both the measures or interventions as well as the impact of the interventions, related to COVID in the six chosen countries (Japan, India, Ethiopia, Israel, Italy and the Netherlands). Four themes are common to all six countries (Social Cohesion, Lockdowns, Economic burden and Vaccinations). Each photographer has further chosen two individual themes they are most passionate about.

We shall undertake a fact-based analysis for all six countries for the four common themes. This may at this stage be only partially feasible if we insist on taking a numerical approach, since relevant and reliable data is probably not available. But nonetheless we shall explore what is possible. We urge the best to maintain passionate intensity, to continue to seek the centre, to engage with the worst, while realizing that we cannot be sure what is the best and worst in this case just yet. Therefore, it is all the more important to engage and respect each other’s perspectives.