COVID-19: “No one could have anticipated this”

A near-deserted Southport promenade

One afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I was walking along the promenade in Southport, Merseyside, and for a while there were no pedestrians, cyclists or vehicles on what was usually a busy thoroughfare. For a few minutes, I felt like a character in one of those post-apocalyptic stories in which someone wakes up and wanders the streets only to find he is a solitary survivor, such as in '28 Days Later' or 'The Day of the Triffids'. The illusion was soon dispelled of course, but for a few moments it was a slightly eerie experience to wander in daytime around a familiar public place that was completely devoid of people.

COVID-19 is the first pandemic that has affected my way of life, but it is certainly not the first pandemic of my lifetime: AIDS, H1N1 Swine Flu, Ebola and SARS are just some of the widespread diseases to have afflicted the human race in recent decades, but the big difference this time is that the whole world has been affected, if not by catching the disease, then by all the restrictions to which everyone has been subjected. This is definitely not merely a problem in a far away country involving people of whom we know nothing (to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain's infamous turn of phrase).

I have been in turn surprised and frustrated when people say, “No one could have anticipated this”. Such a statement is profoundly ignorant of human history – there have been many more pandemics than those I've listed, such as the post-WW1 flu outbreak that killed around 50 million people and the Black Death which wiped out between and third and a half of the population of Europe [click here for a list of history's 20 worst pandemics]. What is the basis for assuming that we in the comfortable West had somehow become immune? It was only a matter of time before something like this hit us, and with international air travel, diseases can spread in weeks over areas that in previous times would have taken them years or even decades to cover.

There is also an element of smugness involved: we Westerners have tended to assume that with our sophisticated health care systems we can respond rapidly to any such incursions and contain them before they get out of hand, unlike large areas of Africa and Asia that have inadequate health provision. Pandemics in such areas haven't concerned the West as much as they should have done, mainly because they haven't affected our businesses, economies and national prosperity. Such hubris was bound to be punctured sooner or later.

Fiction has not been short of pandemic predictions. To give two more examples (out of many): the BBC TV drama 'Survivors', made in the 1970s and remade in 2008, and 'The Stand' by Stephen King (novel 1978 and TV series 1994), in both of which most of the world's population is wiped out by a mutated virus for which there is no cure. In the USA, some people have been comparing COVID-19 to 'The Stand'; Stephen King himself tweeted that it wasn't really the same and encouraged people to take care of themselves. A reply from one individual demanded angrily of the author: how did he know? Had he actually read the book?

The point is that pandemics have existed in modern times both in real life and in popular fiction (books, radio dramas, TV series and films), and I therefore can't see how anyone could seriously assert that it was impossible to anticipate one affecting the entire world. People doing so either are ignorant (wilfully or otherwise), or are defending political regimes in power at the time.

There have always been pandemics – the earliest-known one was around 3000 BC in China – and while they continue to persist in modern times, we in the West complacently tended to ignore them because they usually affect the developing world rather than us. However, as many fictitious pandemics have suggested, we can all be vulnerable to a virus mutation for which we have no treatment and against which no nations would have any defence, which is precisely what is happening now in real life. Fortunately, COVID-19 is nowhere near as deadly as its fictional counterparts: we can be thankful we are not facing a 90+% mortality rate.

After this pandemic subsides, and history shows us that they all do sooner or later, we in the West should realise that we do not have any kind of invulnerability. Instead of glibly asserting that COVID-19 could not be anticipated and planned for, we should be humble enough to learn from this experience that in a closely connected world, no nation is an island entire of itself (to paraphrase John Donne) and that such an emergency, not only can happen again, but definitely will. The only question is: when?