Like many people, I have had Covid and I have had long Covid. They are very different experiences. I first caught the disease at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, when its effects were relatively unknown. It was unnerving and highly unpredictable. I did not get particularly sick, but I probably gave the virus to my father, who did. Back then, Covid appeared to be the great divider – the old were far more at risk than the young, and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities most at risk of all – and the great equaliser. Almost everyone experienced the shock and the fear of discovering a novel killer among us. We soon acquired a shared language and a sense of common purpose: to get through this together – whatever this turned out to be.
I developed long Covid last year, six months after I had caught glandular fever. The fresh bout of the Covid virus made the effects of the glandular fever far worse: more debilitating and much harder to shake. Some mornings it was a struggle to get out of bed, never mind leave the house. It was as though Covid latched on to what was already wrong with me and gave it extra teeth. The experience was unpredictable in a very different way from the drama of getting sick in 2020: not a cosmic lottery, but a drawn-out bout of low-level, private misery. Good days were followed by bad days for no obvious reason, hopes of having recovered were snuffed out just when it seemed like the worst was past. Long Covid is less isolating than being locked down, but it is also a lonelier business than getting ill at the peak of the pandemic was, if only because other people have moved on.
The physical and psychological effects of these different versions of Covid – the short and the long – are oddly parallel to its political consequences. The disease turns out to be its own metaphor. We are all suffering from political long Covid now. The early drama is over. A series of lingering misfortunes has replaced it. As with long Covid, different countries are suffering in different ways, trapped in their own private miseries. The shock of the new has gone, to be replaced by an enduring sense of fatigue.
When the pandemic hit, its effects on politics were intensely felt and hard to predict. In some ways, it seemed like the ultimate stress test. Different political systems – and leaders – were exposed in different ways. Those with longstanding vulnerabilities seemed destined to fail. At the same time, the advent of Covid appeared to open up the prospect of new kinds of political solidarity. We were in this together. Covid’s global impact was a reminder of what it is that we all have in common. An acute awareness of our shared vulnerability might create the conditions for a renewed sense of purpose in tackling global problems, including the climate emergency. Maybe a pandemic was just what we needed to remember what was at stake, and to remind some of us how lucky we are.
Four years on, the picture looks very different. The immediate experience of the pandemic feels more and more remote, even though public inquiries are now under way, trying to establish just what really happened and who was to blame for what went wrong. Part of the reason for the remoteness is that much of what once looked like high-stakes decision-making has come out in the wash: many outcomes were similar, regardless of the political choices that were made. Maybe it was in the lap of the gods after all.
At the same time, the more pernicious but harder to recognise political consequences of Covid are all around us. The immediacy of the threat has passed, but the lingering signs of the damage it did to the body politic are everywhere. The pandemic and its consequences – lockdowns, economic dislocation, inflation, growing frustration with political elites – have found out pre-existing weaknesses in our politics and made them worse. It has given what ails us extra teeth.
The early days of Covid gave reason to hope that the massive disruption it entailed might also shift the direction of travel of global politics. That hope turned out to be illusory. In the first phase of the pandemic, it looked to have exposed populist grandstanding for what it was: bleach, it turned out, was no sort of viral disinfectant. But populism remains on the rise around the world, feeding off the many discontents of the lockdown years, and of the years that preceded them.
Likewise, Covid did not start any major wars – 2020 and 2021 were two of the most peaceful years for international conflict on record. But a post-Covid world is now as militarily dangerous as at any time since the cold war.
Covid did not exacerbate climate breakdown: for a short while, carbon emissions fell as economies shut down. But the world is still getting warmer and the hope that tackling the virus would provide a model for more urgent climate action turns out to have been a pipe dream.
The pandemic wormed its way into the weak spots in our political life, just as long Covid finds weaknesses in the human body. It no longer galvanises us, nor is it capable of destroying us. Instead, its symptoms are erratic and hard to fathom, appearing in surprising and seemingly unrelated places. Political long Covid is neither the great divider nor the great equaliser. It’s the great destabiliser.
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During 2020, when the pandemic forced governments around the world to improvise their responses at breakneck speed, it looked as though it would expose some basic truths about the strengths and weaknesses of different political systems. The biggest and most immediate contrast was between autocratic China and the democratic west. Ruthlessness and decisiveness – which the Chinese political system appeared to possess in abundance – were the order of the day. The democracies struggled to keep up.
In March of that year, after Italy became the first European country to grapple with the question of how to keep its population from infecting one another, the Chinese sent a group of health officials to help advise. The Italians were concerned by the fact that, despite putting draconian lockdowns in place, the virus was still spreading. The Chinese explained the problem. These weren’t actually lockdowns as they understood them. People could still leave their homes for emergencies, enforcement was sporadic, and punishment was relatively light. Meanwhile, in Wuhan, the very centre of the Covid outbreak, armed guards stood outside apartment blocks, curfews were brutally enforced and those with the virus could be barricaded inside their homes. Within a matter of weeks, Italy’s death toll was more than double that of China’s.
The biggest contrast with China was the US, where a federal system of executive decision-making, a widespread suspicion of government mandates and an incompetent president meant that Covid soon killed far more people than anywhere else. If the US was the flagship for democracy, then it looked like democracy was failing to answer the call.
However, it quickly became clear that the global picture was more complicated than any hastily assembled political morality tale might suggest. New Zealand – democratic, liberal and with a robustly independent population – for a long time kept the virus almost completely at bay. The country had the advantage of being an island state that was able to shut its borders. But Britain is also an island, and that made no difference to the government’s ability – or inability – to act. Vietnam, which is not an island, did almost as well as New Zealand. Russia did almost as badly as the US. Some of the worst death tolls were in the countries of eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, which had a mixed legacy of authoritarianism and democracy. Dividing the world up by regime types proved little.
Demography turned out to be as important as politics: elderly, unhealthy populations suffered more. Equally, any geopolitical morality tales concealed a more complex set of tradeoffs. A zero-Covid policy, ruthlessly enforced as in China, turned out to be storing up trouble for the future. Even with the advent of effective vaccines – and China’s homegrown versions turned out to be less effective than elsewhere – too many of China’s population remained unprotected from the virus and the much-delayed economic opening left them exposed. China has also displayed a longstanding weakness of autocratic systems: an absence of transparency means we don’t know the ultimate death toll there, because they are not telling. It is simply not possible to compare it with other countries.
The wider tradeoffs – the toll that lockdowns have taken on mental health, on treatment for other illnesses, on educational prospects for the children worst affected – make it hard to draw any clear political lessons. Sweden, which was heralded – and viciously derided – for providing a real-time experiment in the efficacy of non-lockdown policies, now presents as mixed a picture as anywhere else: more Covid-related deaths than its Scandinavian neighbours (2,576 deaths per million, compared with Denmark’s 1,630 and Norway’s 1,054) but similar or even lower overall excess mortality rates from all causes, and less educational and economic disruption, though no readily quantifiable economic benefits. Covid was not just a political stress test. It was a series of impossible choices.
Four years on, it is also clear that many of the lasting political consequences of the virus have little to do with the relative performance of individual governments. In the UK, the long-term incumbent parties north and south of the border are suffering serious Covid fallout despite adopting opposed approaches to the pandemic. The Tories in Westminster were reluctant lockdowners, the SNP in Edinburgh far more enthusiastic ones. It made little odds for the final outcomes: overall mortality rates were relatively consistent for the UK as a whole and variations had more to do with the underlying population profiles in different parts of the country than with the policy preferences of elected politicians.
What lingers is something more familiar: the whiff of corruption and the stench of hypocrisy. Although Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, was responsible for one of the more hare-brained schemes of 2020, “eat out to help out” – which gave diners discounts for getting back into pubs and restaurants, at a time when the virus was still widespread in the population and about to surge back – that is not the reason why he is in such deep political trouble. Instead, the Covid legacy that haunts the Tories stems almost entirely from the parties held in Downing Street during Boris Johnson’s premiership, when the rest of the country was still locked down. Ultimately it is not the contrast between the public performance of different administrations that has come to matter politically, but the contrast between public pronouncements and private practice: not how many died in the end, but how many died while the wine was flowing in Downing Street. Hypocrisy is the political killer.
The same is true for the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, who once appeared caring and decisive in her nightly news conference, now seems sanctimonious and evasive, her WhatsApp messages long deleted, her personal grievances exposed. The harsh light of a public inquiry has revealed the SNP to have been as motivated by petty point-scoring and score-settling as any other self-interested political party.
Politics everywhere – in whatever form – takes its toll on its practitioners. The scars accumulate, especially for longstanding administrations. Covid, initially, appeared to be something else: an unprecedented governmental challenge, requiring a new kind of skill set. But in the end, it found a way to expose the regime fatigue that had set in regardless. As Johnson and Sturgeon have discovered, long political Covid is a lonelier business than the exposure they faced in the white heat of the initial outbreak. It works its way through to latch on to personal vulnerabilities and makes them far harder to shake off.
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What happened to the sense of solidarity that the arrival of Covid appeared to have engendered? In the early days of the pandemic, many governments – including in the UK – were worried that people would soon tire of restrictions on their freedom of movement. Some behavioural models had indicated that widespread disobedience would become the norm after a matter of weeks. Those models turned out to be wrong. Most citizens around the world did as they were told for far longer than might have been expected.
This gave rise to a hope that concerted action on an equivalent scale might be possible in other areas, too. If, in the face of a serious threat, the public was willing to act in the common interest, even if that meant making significant personal sacrifices, then perhaps other collective action problems – from mass migration to the climate crisis – might be amenable to a similar spirit of cooperation. Maybe we were more public-spirited than we had given ourselves credit for.
Yet no such dividend has been delivered. On the most contentious political questions, we remain as far apart as ever. Environmental policies – particularly when tied to net zero targets – still provoke deep divisions and can stoke widespread anger. A voting public that was so furious with Johnson over breaking his own Covid rules that it effectively helped turf him out of office nonetheless elected a Tory in his Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency when the party turned the issue of the Ulez traffic levy being introduced by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, into a symbol of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of local communities. Lockdown was one thing. But environmental protections are something else: readily weaponised as evidence of elite interference in ordinary people’s lives.
Anti-immigrant sentiment, including among many of the older voters who most dutifully complied with Covid restrictions, continues to fuel populism around the developed world. Geert Wilders won the popular vote in last year’s Dutch general election on a platform that combined migrant-bashing with net zero scepticism. But unlike some other far-right politicians, Wilders is no Covid sceptic. He had also been one of the first Dutch politicians to complain about his country’s slow rollout of its Covid vaccination programme.
Why does Covid solidarity not translate to other areas? In part, it is the lack of any comparable sense of urgency. Net zero targets are there to stave off long-heralded but also long-distant threats of catastrophe. At its height, Covid threatened to crash public health systems in a matter of days. But there is another difference. Public support for government restrictions during Covid was about controlling collective behaviour when it threatened our personal safety. The danger was other people: keep them in to keep us safe. Climate action is so much harder to sell because it seems to represent an infringement of personal freedom for the sake of some far less immediate collective benefit. In that sense, Covid compliance has more in common with anti-immigrant sentiment. Keep them out to keep us safe.
Throughout the pandemic, public opinion in the UK tended to be critical of the government for being too eager to lift restrictions rather than too keen to impose them. In a pandemic the majority of British people want other people to be told what to do, even if it means being told what to do themselves.
This has not been the case everywhere. In large parts of the US, the public proved deeply resistant to the many varieties of mandated behaviour, particularly when it came to mask-wearing, which became a proxy for a whole host of other resentments and frustrations. The pandemic latched on to what unites us and what divides us. It did nothing to change the contours of those divisions.
The truth is that public cooperation during Covid did not reveal civic capabilities of which we had been unaware. Publics obeyed the injunctions of democratic politicians because those politicians were already doing their best to respond to the choices of the public. Successfully observed lockdowns were as much a reflection of ongoing behaviour as they were a constraint upon it. Likewise, when lockdowns failed, it was often because political leaders, themselves pandering to perceived public opinion, failed to endorse them wholeheartedly.
Covid didn’t generate the political response required to change the way we live. In most cases, it gave us the political response that we asked for.
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The area where Covid made the biggest immediate political difference was in public finance. Politicians suddenly found the money that was needed to stave off disaster, conjuring it up any way they could. The magic money tree turned out to exist after all. In a genuine crisis, despite everything that had been said about the insurmountable limits on public spending, there proved to be both a will and a way to surmount them.
As chancellor in 2020, Sunak launched a furlough scheme that guaranteed 80% subsidies to almost everyone in employment: the closest the UK has ever come to instituting a kind of universal basic income. In the US, a rolling series of extensive relief and stimulus packages included direct cash payments to all households, mortgage relief, tax holidays and giant subsidies to businesses. As a result, people stayed in work and businesses stayed afloat, while public debt in both countries soared. At the same time, governments around the world spent heavily to support vaccine development programmes. Conventional practice in the pharmaceutical industry meant there was invariably a multi-year gap between finding a new treatment and bringing it to market. But again, these constraints turned out to be dispensable. Effective vaccines arrived within a year of the outbreak.
Was this, then, the model for an alternative political future, in which vastly accelerated public spending can drive innovation while protecting citizens from disruption? Could it be the means of tackling the climate crisis?
In reality, the response to Covid was less like a trial run for a new climate politics and more like the response to a war. The emergency measures were put in place for the attritional phase of the pandemic, when the threat of collapse was real. They have been steadily wound down ever since. Meanwhile, the spending on vaccine research was only a part of wider government programmes that tended to be far less efficient and highly wasteful. As in any actual war, successful weapons programmes are the exception, not the norm. Most of the money gets siphoned off by schemes that go nowhere.
As a result, the legacy of government action on Covid has been lingering dissatisfaction rather than a new sense of political possibility. The symptoms of political long Covid include public frustration with the bill that has to be paid. Part of the cause for that frustration is widespread inflation, stoked by looser public finances, which has fuelled anger with governments around the world and created electoral volatility. Javier Milei might not be president of Argentina without Covid-fuelled inflation. Donald Trump might not be making a comeback without it, either.
At the same time, stories of the waste and corruption that inevitably went along with unfettered government spending continue to surface. In the UK, the face of government pandemic spending is not Kate Bingham, the head of the highly effective UK vaccines taskforce, but the Tory peer Michelle Mone, who is accused of having used a VIP fast-lane to bypass standard procurement processes and secure government contracts for a company to supply PPE worth more than £200m, much of which apparently turned out to be useless (though the company denies this). The price of sidelining politics as normal is that when politics as normal resumes, the corner-cutting doesn’t look so good.
In the aftermath of the first and second world wars, when government spending among the belligerents was colossal, and waste and corruption were widespread, lasting social transformation nonetheless followed in their wake. The foundations of a new kind of welfare state were laid by the scale of wartime public investment, along with a sense that public sacrifices needed to be repaid.
The pandemic has not been the same. In part, it is a question of scale. The $12bn the US federal government spent supporting vaccine research is a drop in the ocean of public spending. Even the trillions of dollars the US government made available in various forms of aid pales compared with the legacy of pre-existing programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid. The levels of US public debt in 2024 are similar as a percentage of GDP to what they were in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of second world war. But that has more to do with the long-term burdens of welfare programmes and defence spending than with the response to Covid.
In a war, the young fight and give up their lives to keep the old safe, who in return pledge to make life better for the those who are being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. It is part of what creates a sense of mutual obligation between the generations. In Covid, it was the old who lost their lives, but it was still the young who made many of the sacrifices, in lost employment and educational opportunities. That makes the tradeoff more complicated. Its legacy has not been a new intergenerational compact. If anything, political differences between the generations are wider than ever, and Covid has exacerbated them. The young have not been repaid for their sacrifice with the kinds of promises that tend to follow an actual war: better housing, greater educational access, full employment. This is in part because the price paid by the younger generation has proved far harder to quantify than the physical toll the disease took on the old. Who owes whom for what? This was a war with no obvious winners.
Except, perhaps, those politicians who saw what might come next. In October 2022, as his invasion of Ukraine was stalling, Vladimir Putin told his government coordination council in Moscow that the lesson was clear: Russia needed to translate Covid urgency into military urgency. “We faced certain difficulties and the need to upgrade our work, give it a new momentum and a new character when we were responding to the coronavirus pandemic,” he said. Those lessons had to be taken forward in prosecuting the war. “We need to get rid of those archaic procedures that are preventing us from moving forward at the pace the country needs.” As a first step, Putin declared martial law in the four regions controlled by Russian forces.
Covid was not an actual war, though it often felt like one. Nor was Covid a dry run for how to deal with the challenge of the climate crisis, though it occasionally felt like that too. Now we know that Covid was, for some politicians, a dry run for war itself.
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Covid did not fundamentally change the way we live. The French writer Michel Houellebecq, when asked what impact Covid would have on the future, said: “The same, but worse.” That is perhaps too bleak. It is not all worse. In some respects, life has returned to its previous patterns, for better and for worse. The drivers of change remain the same, even if some of them have accelerated.
The pandemic dramatically accelerated some social transformations that were already under way. Working from home was something being facilitated by new technology long before 2020. The pandemic did not create hybrid working, nor did it begin the steady hollowing out of downtown office space. But it brought them forward by about a decade.
Politics, too, is similar enough to what went before that it seems unlikely future historians will see 2020-21 as representing a sea-change in world affairs. The US and China are more hostile to each other than they were, though the hostility had been growing for more than a decade before 2020. The Middle East is more unstable than it was, electoral politics more fractious, authoritarians more assertive, the planet hotter, the disparities greater. This is somewhat different. But none of it is new. And there is no vaccine for political long Covid, any more than there is for the longer form of the disease itself. Its effects are too sporadic and its triggers still too poorly understood for that.
But in one respect, the political consequences of Covid in 2024 might yet come to look decisive in the history of the 21st century. The politician who paid the highest electoral price for the pandemic was Donald Trump. At the start of 2020 he was well set for re-election: the US economy was relatively strong, his base was relatively happy (above all with his nominations to the supreme court), and the Democrats were unable to agree on a candidate to oppose him. Covid changed all that. Trump handled it badly – he never got his message straight – and even some of his supporters noticed. The economy suffered. The Democrats rallied behind Joe Biden, who did not have to suffer the physical stresses of a full campaign because most forms of campaigning were impossible. Trump lost, but only narrowly – without Covid he would almost certainly had won.
For the many people inside and outside the US who found Trump beyond the pale, his removal from office looked like one of the few blessings of the pandemic. Yet had Trump won in 2020 he would have been, like most second-term US presidents, something of a lame duck. He had achieved little by way of serious reform in his first term: a second term would have likely been even more underwhelming, since Trump runs on resentment, which re-election would have done much to defuse. Now, in 2024, we would be looking at the back of Trump, and at a new generation of candidates, some of whom might have been offering something new.
Instead, a narrow defeat in 2020 – coupled with his insistence that he had been robbed – has given Trump all the resentment he needs. It is Biden who has inherited the problems of a post-Covid world and the challenge of defending his administration from the resentments that have built up. A second Trump term coming after an interlude of four years, during which time he and his supporters have been making sure they won’t get fooled again, and his opponents have been looking for ways to have him jailed, is a far more serious prospect. The stakes are much higher. The damage could be far greater.
This year is the busiest year around the world in the history of electoral democracy: more than 4 billion people are entitled to vote in elections from India to Ireland to Mexico. It is one sign that Covid, which put so many democratic freedoms on hold, did not do so permanently. But the US presidential election in November still has the potential to outweigh all that. Trump is by no means certain to win. Yet if he does, and if he decides this time to make good on his promise to change the way the US is governed, by hollowing out the administrative state and by withdrawing US support for Ukraine and for Nato, then Covid will have had a truly lasting impact on global politics. At that point, political long Covid will be hard for any of us to escape.
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