Viral Myths: Why We Risk Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Pandemic

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has given rise to the phenomenon of "Coronfirmation Bias", a tendency to interpret the pandemic as a vindication of one’s worldview. Three ideas have become part of the conventional wisdom: that the UK was caught unprepared because a decade of austerity had hollowed out the public sector, that COVID-19 is a crisis of "globalisation gone too far", and that the NHS has been the star performer of the pandemic. All three of these conventional wisdoms can be challenged. We can see this by comparing the countries that coped best with the pandemic to those that coped worst. Among the former are the four "Asian Tigers": Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They had exceptionally low levels of deaths, minimised the economic fallout, and preserved personal freedoms and a semblance of normal life. The UK, Spain, and Italy are among those that struggled most. All four had exceptionally high death rates, severe recessions, and stringent lockdown measures. Three things stand out from comparing them: better performers have lower levels of public spending and highly globalised economies and do not have national health services. The claim of this paper is not that best performers did well because they have low public spending levels or because they have non-NHS-type healthcare systems, but that an effective pandemic response is compatible with a variety of public spending levels, a variety of trade regimes, and a variety of healthcare systems.