The Fury of COVID-19: The Politics, Histories, and Unrequited Love of the Coronavirus

By Vinay Lal

‘No one till now has written on the coronavirus against a cultural backdrop as vast as this—crossing centuries, continents and disciplines. This small book will outrun all the repetitive details of the pandemic with which we are being regularly bombarded’ ASHIS NANDY

‘Vinay Lal's 3-D analysis of the what and the why of the COVID experience, is a must read for grasping the finer lines of history, culture and literature invisibly woven into the global response to the pandemic’ GANESH DEVY

‘Lal writes with an ease that is a pleasure to read. This book shows how we can see ourselves in the crisis of COVID-19, in the mirrors of our common, shared but unfinished humanity’ SATENDRA NANDAN

There has never been anything like the Covid-19 pandemic in history. The world as we knew it has changed and the fury of Covid-19 has unleashed new forces, leaving us with an uncertain future. Though its fatality rate, in comparison with some previous epidemics such as the Black Death and the ‘Spanish flu’ of 1918-20, is strikingly low, and though it follows in the path of epidemics such as HIV, SARS, and Ebola, the coronavirus pandemic has produced outcomes which are altogether unprecedented. There is no other instance where the world was, over three months, brought to a standstill and the global economy shuttered. Most countries imposed a ‘lockdown’ and shut down their borders. In Italy and Spain, old people were left to die; in India, millions of migrants took to the road. In some countries rulers have assumed emergency powers. America, the world’s superpower, has been brought to its knees. The economic impact of the outbreak has been shattering; the environmental implications may yet be monumental. Investigating all these trends and the social, cultural, political, and philosophical aspects and implications of the pandemic, this book evaluates the fate of humankind and the earth in its wake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9789389104240

Book preview

for Anju

always there

and

for Harsh Mander

always there for

the people and Constitution of India

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

I The Singular and Sinister Exceptionality of COVID-19

II Plague and Pestilence in India, 1896–1920 14

III A Country of Old Men and Women: COVID-19 in Italy

Box 1: Gandhi on the Ethics of Nursing and Healing

IV The Virus and National History: The ‘Freedom-Loving’ English People

V Patriots against the Virus: France, Sweden, and the United States

VI Migrants on the Move: COVID-19 and India’s Labouring Class

VII (Social) Distancing: Its Vices and Virtues

VIII Quarantine, Self-Quarantine, Solitude: Initial Explorations

Box 2: Remote Learning: The Politics of Corona Pedagogy

IX Distancing in India: Class, Caste, Pollution

X The Virus as the ‘Enemy’: Nationalism and the Other

XI Viral Capitalism: Political Economy and the Virus

XII The Virus and the Vice of Discrimination

XIII The Humbling of the United States: The Virus and American Exceptionalism

Box 3: Cuba: An Island Nation, the Coronavirus, and Ecumenical Medical Practice

XIV Who’s Responsible: The WHO and Medical Internationalism

XV Climate Change, Consumption, and the Coronavirus

Box 4: Dogs and Humans: An Inverted Relationship in a Pandemic

XVI Politics and Society after COVID-19: Reflections on the Human Condition

Notes

Index

Preface and Acknowledgements

In late February a Japanese scholar, who had invited me to a conference on Gandhi that was scheduled to be held at the University of Tokyo on March 7, emailed me with the news that the organizers of the conference had reluctantly taken a decision to call it off in view of the enormous uncertainty generated by the creeping spread of the coronavirus beyond China. The virus had yet to strike most countries and the news from Italy, which would soon transfix everyone, was still a trickle. Around the same time, on the evening of February 27, I spoke on the phone with another Japanese friend who shared with me the information that some hours ago Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had called for all schools to be shut down nationwide with immediate effect and to remain closed until early April. Abe’s decision seemed puzzling to my friend as it did to me. The course that the virus had taken thus far suggested that children were, if not entirely immune to COVID-19, very unlikely to be struck by the virus. There were almost no reports of children having become infected and the disease certainly did not seem to be fatal to them; moreover, leaving aside China, no other country had been widely reported as having ordered its schools shut. There were no WHO guidelines on school closures at this time, and though in Britain 13 schools had shut down, a decision taken in each instance by the school principal, the Health Minister Matt Hancock stated categorically that there was no need for any school to close unless it had a confirmed case of the coronavirus. In retrospect, Abe maybe viewed as having acted not just with caution but admirable prudence. If Italy has an ageing population, that is all the more so true of Japan which is in the midst of a demographic crisis. It has the oldest population in the world, 28 per cent of the Japanese are over 65 years old, and its fertility rate is below replacement rate. Abe may have been thinking of the implications for the country if the virus does strike children, even toddlers and elementary school-age children, and acted with what now maybe deemed as foresight in ordering schools closed. He must have seen school closures as vital to protect the country’s future.

Eight months after SARS-CoV-2 was first reported, we now know with greater certainty that the virus can be transmitted to children even if adults account for a preponderant number of all cases. In the US, coronavirus among children increased by 21 per cent halfway through the month of August and 50,000 children are reported to have been infected by mid-August. Yet the science is still, to use a rather cliched word, ‘evolving’ – a testament, the scientists will say, to the interminable search for truth that is purportedly intrinsic to the scientific method. Scientists periodically report findings at odds with guidelines issued by the WHO and similar national bodies, and these guidelines appear to be revised every few weeks. Until July 9, when the WHO issued a new set of guidelines, the organization’s stated position had been that airborne transmission was only prevalent during certain medical procedures and that infections almost always occur when respiratory droplets emanating from an infected person are inhaled by another person in very close proximity or, much less frequently, when contaminated surfaces are touched. It then grudgingly admitted that aerosols, or microscopic particles, can linger in the air for hours and may transmit the virus to others. It took an open letter from 239 researchers from 32 countries to make the WHO and CDC modify their positions, though the WHO, pointing to an outbreak at a choir practice in Washington in which 53 of the 61 singers were infected and two died, still felt constrained to add that research is ‘urgently needed to investigate such instances and assess their significance for transmission of COVID-19’. Though the six-feet rule for physical distancing has not been revised as such, a number of reports from scientific researchers have been calling that into question and some research suggests that the coronavirus can travel three to four times that distance in the air. It is entirely conceivable that even this basic rule may be cast aside as inadequate in the weeks ahead.

This book has been a greater challenge than any other book I have written not merely because the science behind the coronavirus is debatable. Indeed, science forms a very little part of the book. Some of the data will have become obsolete, though the substantive implications of such changes are generally very slight. Though some version of the ‘lockdown’, an odd term for reasons I will turn to shortly, has been observed in nearly every country, the national response has still varied considerably. In this book, to take one illustration, I compare briefly the success of Vietnam in containing the virus with the way it has galloped from place to place in the US. When I wrote about Vietnam a few weeks ago, the country had zero deaths, fewer than 500 cases, and it had flattened the curve. Just days after I completed the chapter, the number of cases started to spike, and by early August a handful of deaths had been recorded. The attentive reader, I am hopeful, will not chafe at such ‘inaccuracies’, if they are such, since the deaths, which have risen to 20 at the time of this writing, do not alter the substantive arguments. The comparison of the US and Vietnam is especially instructive, not least because Vietnam is a communist state but the US cannot rail against it as responsible for having spread the virus. Donald Trump has not, at least not yet, let loose a barrage of tweets condemning the ‘Vietnam virus’. When I was thinking of Vietnam alongside of the US, I was reminded of a bedtime story about the ant that tormented the elephant. The Americans, with the largest and most sophisticated military arsenal in the world, desecrated, destroyed, and defoliated Vietnam and yet lost the war, and they have unquestionably lost the present war – their own metaphor, rather than mine – and not just against the virus. There are already three times as many Americans whose lives are lost to the pandemic as lost in the Vietnam War. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the sage from Concord, Massachusetts, is no longer read very much by his countrymen and women, but he would have described all of this as the law of compensation at work: ‘Every act rewards itself, or in the words, integrates itself, in a two-fold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many years.’

In the last few weeks since the book was written, cases in New Zealand have similarly gone up once again. Trump was quick off his feet with observations that are as hollow and comical as he is himself, ‘Big surge in New Zealand. It’s terrible. We don’t want that.’ That ‘big surge’ amounted to 13 new cases on August 18, the same day when the US recorded over 50,000 new cases – about what the US has been averaging every day for the last few weeks if we just take a nice round figure. New Zealand has enough to eviscerate Trump on this score but civility only permitted New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to remind everyone that he is ‘patently wrong’. But this episode is illustrative of something that is of greater import, namely that every day brings forth something new that adds to our understanding of the coronavirus and yet muddles up the picture still more. A child might envision the virus as something that likes to play a game of hide and seek, while a philosopher will be tempted to think of the dialectic of the visible and the invisible. Likewise, when the idea of ‘herd immunity’ was invoked by Boris Johnson, it was met with some degree of incredulity especially as it appeared from official pronouncements as if the UK government was prepared to allow for a certain number of people to get infected. This raises the suspicion that some people might be herded to their death – among these ‘some people’, the poor, the aged, and those who already have underlying health vulnerabilities are likely to predominate. But the idea behind ‘herd immunity’ is sound if one accepts it as fact that the coronavirus, much like any other virus, will wither and fade into history if it is unable to find enough hosts on whom it can feed. At some point there will not be enough people who are vulnerable either because too many people have been infected and outlived their infection or because they were vaccinated. Just what percentage of a population needs to have been infected before ‘herd immunity’ can be achieved is far from clear. Some scientists have argued for around 70 per cent, but newspapers in mid-August were reporting that such herd immunity, which is calculated from the reproductive number of a disease (R0), may perhaps be achieved with around 40–50 per cent of the population. One very recent study based on a household survey carried out in Mumbai found that 51–58 per cent of the residents in poor neighbourhoods had antibodies, while elsewhere in the city that figure had dropped to 11–17 per cent. Should one therefore conclude that the virus was silently infecting the poor in large numbers – and this because the poor in the slum are more vulnerable for the various reasons that have been discussed in the literature and similarly in this book? However, such a conclusion does not easily, if at all, conform to the knowledge we have of how the virus was tamed in Dharavi, a ‘slum’ with a density of population that staggers the imagination. In Dharavi, as is discussed in this book, the virus seems not to have been staging silent if lethal attacks; rather, social workers, volunteers, and contact tracers went looking for it.

It is my hope that the book raises questions that are more enduring and of greater social, political, ethical, and philosophical import than what may be conveyed only by a superficial consideration of the data. In the response of each country to the pandemic we can see shades of that country’s history, and what is at stake in many countries is not only the health and well-being of the people but also their liberties, as states use the coronavirus pandemic to justify the assumption of powers that would under other circumstances have been viewed as draconian. The ease with which countries fell into imposing a ‘lockdown’ is something that invites reflection, but my friend Ganesh Devy, one of India’s more prominent public intellectuals and a linguist of great repute who initiated a monumental project called the People’s Linguistic Survey of India which has thus far generated around 50 volumes, set me to thinking about some of the more uncommon problems around the idea of a lockdown when he sent me a few pages from a ‘restless linguist’s diary’. He says that on the evening when the country’s prime minister announced a lockdown, he received a call from an Adivasi colleague from Gujarat who has been running an educational institution and wanted a correct translation of the word so that he could place a notice at the entrance of the institution informing students and visitors that the institution was under a lockdown. The Adivasis [literally, original dwellers] are what in English we would call ‘tribals’ or Aboriginals, and there are many Adivasi languages in India. Devy’s note is too long to replicate here, but it is learned, witty, and ironical. The gist of it is that though he worked diligently with dictionaries and considered the question of how one might translate lockdown into an Adivasi language, he kept coming up short. He encountered lock-out, lock up, locker, lock step, lock-nut, lock on to, lockable, lockless but no lockdown. ‘By the time my pouring over the dictionaries and making meticulous notes was over,’ Devy writes, ‘the lockdown hour had come. I concluded that I was under lockdown, a word that does not exist; and so was the country, and probably several other countries in the world. I hit the bed, tired and genuinely intrigued thinking that I was in a world that does not exist and in a world that had ceased to be what it was an hour ago.’ His casual note also reminded me that it is around two to three years ago that the word entered the lexicon of everyday use – where else, of course, but in America where frequent school shootings were compelling principals and superintendents to place schools under lockdown and sending terrified children into hiding under desks, behind locked bathroom doors, and in locked classrooms.

I was aware of the shortcomings of this manuscript even before I had completed it, but a denser exploration of some subjects has not been possible in keeping with the imperative of having the book in the public sphere while the pandemic is still raging in our midst. I should have liked, for example, to discuss at greater length the worrisome implications of triage. When coronavirus cases exploded in Italy and hospital beds and ventilators became scarce, there was talk of sacrificing the old so that the young could live. A subject such as this calls for deep reflection and sustained moral inquiry but not only because the supposition that when resources are scarce the aged, having served out their years, or having lived the good life, must yield to those whose lives lie ahead of them will strike some as reprehensible just as it will strike some others as unfortunately reasonable. The same person may position herself differently in public and private. Even as moral opprobrium seems to attach to those who do not display at least the outward signs of respect for elders, and societies have become increasingly attentive in a programmatic way to the needs of ‘senior citizens’, the world in recent decades seems to have turned in numerous ways to accommodating the gratifications of the young. All of this still occludes still more fundamental considerations, such as the unimpeachable fact that there are still many societies where the elders are the sole repositories of a community’s origin myths, stories, parables, and entire knowledge systems. The loss of the elderly in such communities adds a different dimension to the trauma of death in a nursing home. Nevertheless, even though I have been unable to enter into a protracted discussion of all such subjects, I hope that there is enough in this little book to steer the reader’s attention from only the chatter and information around the coronavirus to something more akin to speculative reflection and thought.

***

Portions of a number of chapters have been published elsewhere, but very little if anything has been reproduced in this book without revisions. The first of my two essays on the coronavirus appeared in OPEN magazine (New Delhi) in its 6 April 2020 issue under the title ‘The Passion and Unrequited Love of COVID-19’. At that time the global tally of deaths stood at 18,000; that number, as of today, is 815,000 and steadily rising. Likewise, portions of the second essay, ‘Patriots against the Virus’ (4 May 2020), have found their way into Chapter IV and Chapter V in particular. I thank the editor, S. Prasannarajan, for affording me a venue to air my views, and am similarly grateful to Russell Leong, an old friend and editor of Corona Conversations East & West, a special edition of CUNY FORUM [aari. info/cuny-forum-volume-81/], for granting me a platform where earlier online versions of the essays on Gandhi and nursing, and on migrant labourers in India, were published. Some portions of one chapter will be published shortly in Sambhashan, a new, elegantly produced bilingual journal launched in May 2020 by the University of Mumbai, which has already come out with several special issues revolving around COVID-19 [mu.ac.in/sambhashan]. I would like to thank Kanchana Mahadevan, the journal’s inaugural editor, for inviting me to contribute to it.

ABP Media Network’s CEO, Avinash Pandey, has been supremely hospitable in several ways. Two years ago, he invited me to blog for the network and the essays on India’s migrant labourers, on the WHO, and on the humbling of America made their first appearance at the ABP website [abplive.in]. The photographs on migrant labourers, taken by reporters on the ground, have been furnished by ABP and I am grateful to Avinash for his generosity and friendship and to members of his staff for their unstinting help.

The cartoon, ‘You must be joking’, by Anthony Smith was first published in the Private Eye (20 March 2020), and his permission to reproduce it is gratefully acknowledged. Several attempts were made to contact Alice Madsen, the apparent copyright holder of the cartoon, ‘It’s for your own good’, but to no avail. A diligent effort to trace the copyright owner of the cartoon, ‘Be Good ... Back Soon!’, was similarly unsuccessful. The photographs on the 1896 Bombay bubonic plague in the Wellcome Collection (London) are in the public domain and are drawn from this website: wellcomecollection.org/works/. They are made available through a Creative Commons License.

Thanks are also owed to Dr Prasun Chatterjee, Editorial Director at Pan Macmillan (India), for embracing the idea of a short book on the coronavirus pandemic with enthusiasm; to my research assistant, Erica Neighbors, in particular for excavating material used in Chapter Two; and to a number of friends who agreed to read, at exceedingly short notice, some chapters of the book: Henry Ranjith (Chennai), Kanchana Mahadevan (Mumbai), Mark Mairot (San Diego), Neelima Shukla-Bhatt (Boston), Russell Leong (Los Angeles/New York), Syed Sami Raza (Peshawar), and Satendra Nandan (Canberra).

Ganesh Devy and I exchanged some correspondence on the subject of the coronavirus and he shared with me some unusual insights. I value our friendship of the last five years and admire the vigour, tenacity, and integrity with which he has immersed himself into the intellectual and public life of India. Harsh and Dimple Mander have been close family friends for nearly two decades. Few people have immersed themselves in the battle for India’s soul as much as Harsh during this period of time, and he has been by the side of India’s migrant labourers in the present crisis in every respect. No words are adequate to convey my appreciation of his deep and unwavering commitment to the Indian republic, its constitution, and above all its people. This book is for him. It is also for my children, Avni and Ishaan, companions at the dinner table – and above all it is for Anju.

Los Angeles

20 August 2020

List of Abbreviations

CHAPTER I

The Singular and Sinister Exceptionality of COVID-19

The singular ineluctable fact about the worldwide political, social, and cultural response to SARS-CoV-2, previously known as the 2019 novel coronavirus, and the disease that it causes, known as COVID-19, is that it is utterly without precedent in the experience of any living person. One might even go so far as to say that the response to COVID-19, taking an expansive view of both time and space, is unprecedented in history. Some, particularly the tribe of scholars to which I belong by the profession known as historians, might chafe at such a description. The word ‘unprecedented’ has itself become cliched, but historians in any case almost never like to hear that word: not only does it threaten to put the historian out of business, but it suggests to her an insufficient awareness of the past. Moreover, to each generation its own sufferings are distinct and unique; quite often, people are apt to magnify the atrocity inflicted upon them. Nevertheless, I suspect that few will quarrel with the argument that the Shoah (the Holocaust, in more common parlance), or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, were without precedent. The global history of genocide records many a holocaust, or the mass elimination of a people singled out on the basis of some characteristics, but it is still possible to see the deliberate, methodical, state-orchestrated, and (shall we dare say it) Enlightenment-driven extermination of some six million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma, supposed sexual deviants, and mentally ill people, as wholly distinct. Similarly, though the fire bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities produced a greater number of casualties than the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and there is a large and gory history of the brute use of airpower to render people into craven submission, we recognize that the nuclear attacks took humankind into previously uncharted territory. It is in a similar vein that what has unfolded in the wake of COVID-19 takes us into a territory for which history provides at best only partial guidance.

There is nothing akin in living memory to the unfolding narrative of COVID-19 and it portends something substantially at variance from ordinary human experience. Humankind is accustomed to catastrophes of much greater dimensions: we have only to recall that about 40 million people were killed in World War I, and at least twice as many in World War II. The 6,35,000 deaths that have been claimed by COVID-19 as of 23 July 2020 are little more than a footnote in the statistical register of preternatural death, though the likely infection and fatality rates that were being mentioned in early March by at least a few scientists and a few other daring souls do not seem as lurid at this time as they did then. We should recall that, in her characteristically sober manner, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned her fellow Germans that 70 per cent of the country’s 83 million people might get infected.¹ Merkel may be disliked by some, but she is respected by many more, and her blunt assessment, along with an equally ominous advisory just days later from the Imperial College London, was sufficient to awaken the United States, whose president thought that the virus was something of a laughing matter, or perhaps ‘fake news’ manufactured by the Chinese to sow chaos and confusion, to the impending threat.² The lead researcher on the Imperial College team did not mince words in stating that ‘the world is facing the most serious public health crisis in generations’.³ As the virus started to tear into American society, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) produced statistical models suggesting that if efforts at mitigation were not immediately taken, 160–210 million Americans could contract COVID-19, and in the worst-case scenario 1.7 million Americans might succumb to the disease.⁴

Even allowing for the fact that over 15 million people have been infected worldwide, and that the worldwide case load is likely to rise substantially through much of the summer and into autumn, since the virus is far from being contained in highly populated countries such as the United States, India, Brazil, and Mexico, the exceptionality of COVID-19 is questionable when we bear in mind that the ‘Spanish flu’ or influenza of 1918–20 is now estimated to have caused 50–100 million deaths worldwide. At least one-fourth of the world’s population at that time was infected, comparable to 1.75 billion people today. If I appear to be undermining my own position, the case for staking the argument that the outbreak of COVID-19 has precipitated a situation which, taken in totality, must be viewed as singular and sinister in human history will have to rest on something else. It will be necessary, in this regard, to consider briefly the origin of the COVID-19 epidemic (as it was before its ‘elevation’ to a ‘pandemic’) and the measures taken by China in quelling it, as well as the history of epidemic disease in the twentieth century and more particularly influenza outbreaks. That may well yield some insight into the circumstances that have led to the present upheaval.

COVID-19 was first reported from Wuhan, in China’s Hubei Province, which has a population just short of 60 million, on 31 December 2019. That report generated little or no alarm; the first death was announced 10 days later. Unbeknownst to the world, Wuhan was in the throes of an outbreak, and some more days would elapse before China sought to put into place stringent, and most would agree draconian, measures to mitigate the spread of the virus. On 23 January 2020, the New York Times while describing Wuhan as the ‘epicenter for a viral outbreak that is worrying the world’, nevertheless felt charitable enough to furnish a sketch of a city of ‘steel, cars and spicy noodles’ that embodied ‘the country’s surge from grinding poverty to industrial powerhouse’.⁵ An outbreak that was ‘worrying the world’ was nevertheless not expected to reach