The Politics of Covid-19

COVID-19 is the first example of a virus that has caused a global quarantine, shutting down the world economy in order to prevent the spread of a virus. If a worldwide shutdown has never been done before, then why is it being done now? Is there some sort of political gain to be made from a pandemic, and is the deadliness of COVID-19 just government propaganda? Let’s analyze the possible political motives behind the pandemic.

Would a government or political group want to shut down the economy using the pandemic as an excuse? There are no short-term benefits to doing so: the bureaucracy has scrambled to make policy changes, the legislature must reach bipartisan agreements, officeholders have to be more cautious about their actions, the government needs to agree on the extent of relief, etc. It’s pretty safe to say that initiating a lockdown is not politically motivated but is a decision made to help protect citizens.

But it’s already been several months since the worldwide lockdown began. Do politicians continue to advocate for safe practices just to boost their own popularity? Indeed, social distancing and wearing masks can be popular among certain populations in a country. For instance, among American citizens, mandatory mask policies tend to be more popular among Democrats than Republicans, and Democrats tend to be more in favor of supporting further relief measures. So in a sense, a party that is advocating for masks and relief checks is trying to attract support from certain people.

But it’s important to realize that this could be said about any issue. Pushing and pulling can be witnessed in all topics of debate, and political parties take a side in order to appeal to voters. In the United States, some commentators have argued that the Democrats have overemphasized the magnitude of the pandemic. While political analysts are not wrong that COVID-19 has become a politically divided issue, political motivations are not the only thing that is guiding politicians’ response to COVID-19.

Regardless of politics, a balance must be struck between the economy and public safety. Officeholders who are currently in power must address high unemployment and unrest, designing a reopening plan that will be safe and approved by the general public. In the first few months of the pandemic, both Republican and Democratic governors decided to lock down their states. Since then, many states have had to roll back reopenings in response to increased infection rates. This is not to say that political party affiliations do not affect pandemic policies, but politicians must address an apolitical virus by adjusting this balance between economy and safety.

There are certainly extremes in how a government addresses COVID-19. Treating the pandemic like a crisis, some countries quickly locked down and severely limited individual freedoms. The Philippines, for instance, enacted shoot to kill orders against citizens who were not abiding by lockdown protocols. However, other nations have denied the virus’s existence entirely. Turkmenistan has reported zero cases and zero deaths, taking few measures to combat COVID-19 and claiming that the virus does not exist within their borders. Kim Jong-un only recently claimed that the first case of COVID-19 may have been found within North Korea’s borders, although information from the dictatorial regime is often misleading.

Like those examples show, the extent to which you can trust government information depends on the nature of the government. In other words, if your country restricts freedom of speech and silences other perspectives, then there’s a possibility that the information that you receive about COVID-19 may be inaccurate because of political motivations. COVID-19 is definitely a real virus, but the statistics that you consume may be biased if you live under a suppressive regime.

How do we know if COVID-19 is actually dangerous if COVID-19 could merely be state-issued propaganda meant to suppress our rights? International organizations, public and private labs, nations around the world, and health experts all verify the existence and dangers of COVID-19. What if they’re all in kahoots, creating an unsubstantiated narrative and forcing people to stay indoors?

The issue with this argument is its “see it to believe it” reasoning. By the same distrust, one could say that any historical figure or event never existed because all historians today have worked together to create a fake explanation for the past. We trust that George Washington was a person because of historical documentation and a consensus among experts who study history. In the same way, we know that COVID-19 exists and is dangerous because of a trust in government, non-governmental organizations, and academia. Unlike history, though, we even have testimonies from living individuals showing the devastating toll that the virus has had on families around the world.

Efforts to keep the public safe from COVID-19 should be treated seriously because they are not just political: medical research supports precautions like wearing masks and social distancing (see our other sections on what wearing a mask can do). The extent to which other policies are enacted and enforced should depend on the severity of COVID-19 in a specific country.

(A side note: some of the commentary in this article is for US politics, but the same basic principles could be applied to what is going on in many other countries. For instance, Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro had been a long-time critic of COVID-19 shutdown policies like mask-wearing. The Braziilian congress moved to override Bolsanaro’s veto on a national mask mandate after Bolsanaro recently contracted the virus. In other countries, a push to reopen has been spurred by factors like high unemployment or the right to a quality education. Serving as an example of how reopening plans can go wrong, Israeli schools attempted to reopen recently, quickly shutting down after an immediate spike in cases.)