Why big nations were brought low by the pandemic

INDIA is now the epicentre of the global coronavirus pandemic. It ranks just behind the US and Brazil in confirmed cases and is growing faster than either. The total rose 20% in just the last week, despite the fact that India is testing less than most of its peers.

It’s looking increasingly likely that India will wind up being the country with the most cases in the world. This is not just a function of its large population; China has over one billion people. It reflects the fact that big, diverse nations are at a disadvantage against pandemics.

Smaller nations such as New Zealand or Thailand can manage the flow of cases by shutting down their international borders, but internal borders are as porous in India as they are in the US.

Imagine, for instance, how impossible it would have been for Europe to flatten its curve if it hadn’t suspended the Schengen agreement and freedom of movement for its 450 million people.

Generally, officials in large nations are reduced to playing whack-a-mole: Even if they stop an outbreak in Kerala or New York, it may pop up somewhere else.

The pressure to “reopen” in such countries is also greater. Large nations do well economically because they have big, interdependent and diverse internal markets.

They can ill afford to have those supply chains broken for long. India was quick to impose a nationwide lockdown at great economic and human cost. Yet now the virus is spreading because people have to move across internal borders if the economy reopens even slightly.

That puts a premium on effective government. Keeping close track of such movements and of every little outbreak would require a centralised state with no shortage of spare capacity – ideally one already primed to spy on its own citizens.

In the US, the pandemic has made the consequence of decades of misallocation and paralysis tragically clear. The American federal structure has been made unfit for purpose in a partisan and divided age. This is reflected in data such as the World Governance Indicators, which has seen the US decline steadily over the past two decades.

India’s state, on the other hand, has always been low on capacity. It’s a standard joke among policy analysts in India that any conversation ont what needs to be done ends with: “But we can’t do that anyway.”

The Indian state is chronically short of managerial resources, talent, resources and time.

Often, if it does one thing well, something else is short. Early on in the pandemic, the state of Kerala received praise for how well it limited the virus’s spread via vigorous contact-tracing. But the state devoted so much to contact tracing that it failed to ramp up testing. Leaders had to admit that cases are increasing through community spread.

One of the long-term consequences of this crisis will be new thinking about federal states and a fresh analysis of what constitutes “waste” and what is vital excess capacity.

Even in the short term, though, there are quick lessons to learn.

One success story was the outbreak in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi, where Slumdog Millionaire was set. Early on, it seemed Dharavi would almost certainly suffer an exponential rise in cases.

Instead, a mix of privately staffed fever clinics, repurposed public infrastructure and manpower from non-governmental organisations managed to flatten the curve.

When the state has insufficient capacity, it needs to strike alliances like this with players in the private sector and non-profits.

That’s a mistake Kerala made: The Communist-run government waited too long to include the private healthcare sector in its plans, undoing much of its earlier success.

Governments must respect NGOs and firms companies respectfully if they want to have a chance of getting through this. — Bloomberg