There can now be no denying that like other countries here in the region, the hemisphere and globally, the coronavirus has gotten our attention. It has done so in the manner of a speeding object colliding suddenly (though not without some measure of warning) with a seemingly immovable wall. It has put normal life ‘on pause,’ so to speak, causing us to behave, these days, as if everything else revolves around the virus, its behaviour and its outcomes and in the kind of shape that it eventually leaves the world in.
That, of course is another matter. It is not just the virologists and specialists in the other disciplines associated with cause and cure that have been engaged with the coronavirus. The recognized scholars of international relations are taking a tilt at it too. About the pandemic an article published in the March 20 issue of the respected Foreign Affairs Journal Foreign Policy (How the World Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic: By Nicholas Burns Joseph S. Nye Stephen M. Walt | Mar. 20, 2020) asserts that the coronavirus and the mind-set that it will leave in its wake “will strengthen the state and reinforce nationalism. Governments of all types will adopt emergency measures to manage the crisis, and many will be loath to relinquish these new powers when the crisis is over.” It is an awesome prediction, almost certainly far distant from our hunkered-down selves, our instinct for self-preservation focused fixedly on tomorrow.
Our almost complete absence of the magnitude of what we might be up against is reflected as much in the poverty-driven, wobbly nature of our official response as in the impish pushback against the defensive refrains that have had to be smothered (at least to some extent) by apocalyptic predictions of the likely price of non-compliance.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is correct in its analysis. Countries, including ours, failed to raise our heads, to heed the warning, the alert coming, in many instances, only after the international media and our own begun to churn out the postponement or complete abandonment of every conceivable sport with which live spectatorship was associated. That was when, in many instances, the alarm bells began to ring…so that we found ourselves in a situation where, virtually overnight, the coronavirus moved from not meriting a great deal more than passing mention in the media to simply taking over. Now we are finding out that there may be a price to pay for poverty and underdevelopment.
We are, as well, finding out, that the jitters that come with fear of the unknown are not confined only to the poor and the powerless. The response in parts of the US and the UK to the coronavirus have been an eye-opener. Food and other consumer goods are regarded by people everywhere as a first line of defence in conditions of national crisis. A first response to news of the ‘arrival’ here of the coronavirus was a frenzied ‘run’ on disinfecting products and an attendant black market outbreak that gradually wound its way up to other consumer items deemed by ‘word of mouth’ to be things that might keep the virus at bay.
Compare that with parts of the US where the citizens of the most powerful country in the world were themselves ‘pillaging’ supermarkets with serious intensity. In Britain, the media were reporting that supermarkets were “trying to prevent shoppers from stockpiling” by putting “purchase limits (we call it rationing here in Guyana) on items including pasta, anti-bacterial wipes, hand soap, toilet paper and children’s medications” since supermarket shelves across the country had been “stripped of such goods” in anticipation by consumers of a likely period of isolation.
The behaviour of American and British consumers helped to erase the conventional wisdom that given the presence of identical difficult situations people necessarily behave differently. Of course, the difference here is that the resources available in wealthier countries allow for a level of latitude in unusual consumer behaviour that we in Guyana are not equipped to deal with. Critically, we demonstrate with monotonous regularity that on the whole and to some extent outside the disciplined and emergency services we are inept in dealing with crisis management.
All of this is simply to say that we cannot afford the ‘luxury’ of being frozen in a condition of leaden-footedness by the coronavirus. It will come and it will pass and it will take its toll and if the blandness of this truth appears chilling that is only because what matters is not just how we respond, today and tomorrow but the lessons we learn and ow we apply them after the virus has done its rounds.
Soulless as it may come across, the analysts of global society would appear to have already made their dreary prediction. COVID-19, the Foreign Policy article says, will “accelerate the shift in power and influence from west to east.” Somehow, the pronouncement sounds too ‘pat,’ too clichéd though we dare not begin by thumbing our noses at it. But, it says, “the global change will not be complete. What won’t change is the fundamentally conflictive nature of world politics,” pretty much the same argument that had been made in previous instances of great plagues including the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic. In the wake of the coming and going of the coronavirus, we will see, the authors of the Foreign Policy article write, “a further retreat from hyper-globalization as citizens look to national governments to protect them and as states and firms seek to reduce future vulnerabilities.”
