Valdai Club

The sharp increase in coronavirus diseases that began in the fall in Europe made us quickly forget the victorious reports that wed heard over the summer in many countries throughout the continent that the virus was defeated and that the virus was contained; to please wear masks and that everything would be fine. Now the situation has become extremely dire; in most European countries, the daily toll of newly-infected people greatly exceeds the spring rates. Meanwhile, the wave of infections on other continents is by no means subsiding. With the exception of China, Thailand, Vietnam and Australia, all other major countries are seeing large increases in infections every day. In many countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas, the daily new coronavirus case count is measured in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.

Let's not quibble over words now, whether this is the second wave of the virus or a delayed first one. Outside the narrow professional boundaries of epidemiology, this debate is perhaps best considered arcane in nature. To a certain extent, the denial of a second wave and the insistence on it being the first can be partly explained by the authorities' search for some self-assured arguments for explaining to the general public the possible insufficiency of the governments response to the coronavirus.

As far as the general public is considered, we repeat, it is not so important how we quantify this new outbreak. For most, another matter is more pressing: if there will be a second lockdown or not.

From the public discourse, one gets the impression that no one wants a second quarantine, neither the public, nor, perhaps, the authorities. There is an understandable psychological fatigue from the stress and shock of last spring, the likes of which most people living in peaceful countries have never experienced in their lives. The negative economic consequences of the first lockdown (a GDP drop, skyrocketing unemployment, the closure of businesses, etc.) also served as a lesson in how not to go about rolling out quarantines. The human rights discourse also retains its significance, according to which the quarantine imposed on society has become an unlawful restriction and violation of human rights. In a number of countries, these human rights arguments are combined with accusations by the authorities of violating their own emergency legislation. All this makes the idea of ​​a new quarantine extremely unpopular, whether politically, economically or socially.

Nevertheless, the virus has taken its toll, and we have seen announcements of certain quarantine measures in recent days in France and in several other countries. But at the same time, in a number of countries, they are accompanied by civil protests, which are sometimes violent. At the same time, the authorities are trying to avoid resorting to a total closure of society, as happened in the spring. In some places, despite the restrictions, schools and universities remain open; in some more widely than in spring; trade and public catering are working. In general, each state is trying to find its own balance of measures between the new quarantine and the need to mitigate its consequences for the economy and society.

In the context of new lockdowns, an analysis of the Swedish experience provides new accents. In spring and summer, the mainstream consensus consisted of harsh criticism of Sweden's refusal to quarantine. We remember when anti-Swedish rhetoric escalated to the point of direct accusations of inhumanity, that the Swedes were practicing a kind of "anti-quarantine fascism". It is also clear that the underlying reason for these accusations was that Sweden, having abstained from the global quarantine approach, served as an example that countries can react to a pandemic in a different way. This made it an inconvenient exception for the authorities of other countries, where, in turn, human rights defenders were already accusing authorities of "quarantine fascism", and where civil protests had ripened. Among this year's media images of mass rallies, Swedes  protesting in the streets of Stockholm, demanding "quarantine us", remain absent. Moreover, if we recognise the success of the Swedish experience, it means that the authorities of the overwhelming majority of other countries were mistaken in their policies. And nobody wants to admit their own mistakes.

Now, in the face of a new quarantine, which promises to be both psychologically undesirable and dangerous for the authorities, the attitude towards the Swedish practice has changed dramatically. Now, many consider it almost as a model from which the authorities of other countries need to learn. And the numbers of infections in Sweden, when measured against the backdrop of new global growth, are far from the most apocalyptic. As of the end of October, according to Worldometers, Sweden was 43rd in the world in terms of the total number of infected people, and 51st in terms of their share per million. Not the worst performance. So the balance of rhetoric between "anti-quarantine fascism" and "quarantine fascism" is now changing.

The response to the coronavirus is becoming more and more ideological. Even if we take Trump's original anti-Chinese polemic off the table, we see, first of all, in the United States, how the internal political confrontation has determined different approaches to the coronavirus. Trump's emphasis on hydroxychloroquine led to its implacable denial in Democratic states, and thus, even in relation to medical protocols for treating the disease; the country was split and could not find a unified approach. The same is true for intra-American discussions about a future coronavirus vaccine. Many vaccine developments in the United States were immediately labelled "Trump Vaccine" and "Democrat Vaccine".

Against this background, the rejection of Russian vaccines in the United States wasn’t even considered a ‘Plan B’.

These heated discussions about quarantine and vaccine policies bring to mind Michel Foucault’s well-known concept of “biopower” - a technocracy dominated by the elites through the subordination of society via health mechanisms. If in relation to geopolitics, the common idea that after a pandemic "the world will never be the same" did not come true (unfortunately), then in relation to society's rejection of the new "biopower" of the elites, this approach does not look like an exaggeration.