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Fareed: This Is Only the First in a Series of Crises
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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
April 4, 2020
Fareed: This Is Only the First in a Series of Crises
“Even as we are just beginning to confront the magnitude of the shock caused by the covid-19 pandemic, we need to wrap our minds around a painful truth,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. “We are in the early stages of what is going to become a series of cascading crises, reverberating throughout the world.”
The shock of Covid-19 is being felt in countries like China, Italy, Spain, and the US, but next will come “explosions in the developing world,” where testing has been scarce, as are resources to cope with an economic crash. Oil-producing states could see chaos: With oil prices crashing even before Covid-19 hit, countries like Libya, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela could see economic catastrophes resulting in “political turmoil, refugees, even revolutions, on a scale we have not seen for decades.”
The world entered this crisis with mountains of public debt and with global cooperation at a nadir. “The problem we face is broad and global,” Fareed writes, “but, unfortunately, the responses are increasingly narrow and parochial.”
Modeling the Models
With epidemiological models driving public predictions and government policies, some have wondered which to trust. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, writes hopefully in an editorial that a University of Washington model predicted between 38,242 and 162,106 US deaths over the next four months, a “terrible human toll” but “much lower than the 2.2 million that the President suggested as a worst case.”
In the journal Nature, David Adam gives a primer on how these models are generated, what they assume, and what they’re missing. A prominent model produced by Imperial College London offered up the worst-case scenario of 2.2 million US deaths and is said to have prompted UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to usher in restrictions. That model assumed a lower Covid-19 mortality rate than early estimates, figuring 0.9% of people who contract the virus will die.
The models are still missing a full picture of the number of cases, Adam writes—in particular, how many infected people show no symptoms—and of how social-distancing measures affect the rate of spread. Neil Ferguson, the lead author on the Imperial College study who himself contracted Covid-19 36 hours after briefing officials at Downing Street, revised his own estimate of UK deaths downward to 20,000 last week, given that social distancing was going well.
The US Economy Has It Bad. Others Could Have It Worse.
The US economy saw more bad news this week, reporting the largest number of monthly job losses since March 2009. The St. Louis Fed, meanwhile, has produced “back of the envelope” calculations predicting US unemployment could top out at 32.1%. But even as the US faces a historic downturn, developing economies—and in particular, their most vulnerable workers—could have it much worse.
At Bloomberg, Adam Minter writes that the world’s 2 billion people who work in the informal economy—and report to no company or on-the-books employer—are at severe risk. Informal workers account for 90% of India’s labor force by some estimates, Minter writes, while in Sierra Leone during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, “home-based informal businesses reported a 40% decline in income.” Informal workers suffer disproportionately when large-scale lockdowns are ordered, but at the same time, government aid packages are largely being targeted at formal businesses—something Minter suggests should change.
Will the Coronavirus Threaten China’s Ruling Party?
Most observers wouldn’t say leadership change is likely in China, Minxin Pei writes for Foreign Affairs. “But the Chinese party-state’s botched initial response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the subsequent eruption of public outrage should make them think again,” he suggests. “The worst public health crisis in the history of the People’s Republic of China has revealed a number of significant weaknesses.”
Pei notes China’s disease-preparedness investments made dafter the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003 and calls the response to Covid-19 even more shocking. Cracks in the government’s censorship machine were surprising, too, Pei writes, as criticism broke through momentarily. President Xi Jinping has concentrated power at the top and instituted an autocracy Pei sees as precarious in the way the Soviet Union’s was, near its end. Covid-19 may prompt dissent among Chinese elites, or at least force reforms that could ultimately endanger Xi and the party, Pei writes, given how “brittle” the government has proven and the “staggering” failure of its Covid-19 response.
Covid-19 and the Dangers of Federalism
The US is still responding to Covid-19 with a patchwork of state and local responses—Florida left its beaches open as other states ordered businesses to close; Arizona’s libertarian streak and looser restrictions are making for an experiment in politics and viral spread, Bryan Bender writes for Politico Magazine—and observers are decrying the downside.
'Lacking strong federal leadership to guide a uniform response, the United States quickly fulfilled the World Health Organization’s prediction that it would become the new epicenter of Covid-19,' health law and policy experts Rebecca Haffajee of the University of Michigan and Michelle Mello of Stanford write in the New England Journal of Medicine, calling on President Trump to at least urge governors in a consistent direction. Predictions have varied as to how much equipment states will need, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board calls for a federal clearinghouse through which states could share information.
But the crisis may test what’s even possible, in America’s federalist system. In an interview with The American Interest, Brookings governance expert William Galston wonders how well Trump could wrangle governors if he wanted to, suggesting that if the president overreached in bossing them around, they might well ignore him.
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