Thoughts During COVID-19 Quarantine

The new Corona pandemic ("COVID-19) led us to experience countless dilemmas, that we, as human beings are contending with. The one I chose to discuss is the dilemma involving the use of advances technological means to fight the pandemic.

Humans have experienced, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, mega disasters of three types: (i) pandemics; (ii) genocide; (iii) wars[1]. The pandemics that claimed the most lives were the Spanish Flu of the first quarter of the twentieth century and the Corona in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Genocide has taken place throughout the millennium in different places and varying intensity. The most prominent were the Jewish Holocaust during the Nazi regime, the Romani (gypsies), Armenian and Sudanese genocides. The twentieth century endured the first (1914-1918) and second (1939-1945) world wars as well as countless of "smaller" wars throughout the millennium.

The common trait of the above phenomena is the wide scope of casualties - tens of millions of dead and hundreds of millions of victims. The difference between them is that in wars and genocide man is fighting man however with a pandemic the entire human race fights against a virus! Another difference comes from the intelligence factor. Intelligence is critical to victory and usually preparation for war takes a long time. On the other hand, pandemics surprise us without any early warning, and we have almost nothing on them in terms of intelligence. We are forced to build the intelligence infrastructure. The time frame for gathering the information, analyzing it and the development of a treatment or a vaccine is very long and all that while the world economy contracts and even collapses.

Therefore, when coming to discuss issues that Corona related and the exit strategy from the pandemic, one must understand the current geo-strategic processes. In 1992, at the end of the Cold War, the political scientist, Francis Fukuyama published his book "The End of History" where he argued that the collapse of the USSR attests to the fact that human beings have chosen liberal democracy and open society that follow freedom, equality and social solidarity. Samuel Huntington the political scientist and thinker counter argued that indeed the era of ideological struggle between liberalism, communism and fascism has come to an end however it will be replaced by a struggle between the Confucian-Chinese, Hindi and Islamic civilizations, which represent authoritarian regimes that deny human rights and liberties and western democracies[2]. That said, one can observe that even within western democracies these days, cracks and fissures appear and are being filled up with anti-democratic, nationalistic and anti-equality elements.

The consensus among world epidemiologists is that the best intelligence tool in fighting Corona is testing, i.e. massive monitoring of the population that provides the best picture regarding the number of infected persons, the connections between them and the geographic concentrations of the outbreak, within the country. Since the world was not prepared to contend with the pandemic it lacked the basic tools to deal with it, first and foremost, testing kits and the laboratory capabilities to produce immediate test results (within 24 hours). The countries hit by the new Corona adopted various strategies to solve that problem but the most common one was to approve testing based upon the occurrence of several preconditions (fever, cough, loss of smell and taste senses etc.). Germany was the only country that had built a national platform to collect symptomatic information, voluntarily obtained from its residents while adhering to protecting their privacy and civil liberties. That platform enabled German authority to accurately map out the spread of the pandemic and treat it effectively and indeed it ranks at the top of the countries that effectively fought the pandemic. Israel, on the other hand, took a different approach. The government of Israel, or rather the prime minister, chose to recruit the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) or Shabak, that owns sophisticated technologies able to pinpoint the location of a person and through it identify patients and their connections with other people. It is said that 50% of the Corona patients in Israel have been located that way. Here, of course, lies a constitutional as well as a moral question: the few western democracies in possession of such a technology, prohibit the use of these technologies on or against their own citizens, and allow such use only against its enemies, as such may be defined under their laws. In Israel's case these technologies were developed to contend with the threat of terrorism, including the interest to avoid collateral damage of non-combatants civilians. The use of these technologies against Israeli citizens, is a clear violation of privacy, which is a basic tenet of democracy. It stands to reason that even if there is an operational sense to use these technologies in the fight against Corona, this use should undergo due process and be reviewed and approved by all relevant organs of the state including publishing such an intent to use the technologies, to the public to give it a chance to appeal to the Supreme Court to block or approve such a use of technology. Israel's approval process was faulty. In addition, the fact that the prime minister is a person that has failed in three election campaigns in one year, couldn't form a government and currently heads an interim government only adds insult to injury already attached to a morally and constitutionally flawed decision.

The attempt to introduce democracy to the Middle East during the Arab Spring (2010-2011) failed twice: (i) democracy was not introduced; (ii) what it did encourage was the radical Islam (al-Qaeda, ISIS and others) which embodies a mix of nihilism and cruelty that were prevalent in the darkest of eras in human history. Hand in hand with the geo-strategic development of the radical Islam over the course of the last two decades, the world balance among western democracies and those countries that adopted a nationalistic rather than national policies, ruthless capitalism instead of liberal economy that embraces solidarity and mutual assistance and trigger happiness to curb basic democratic values, has been tilted towards the latter group. Unfortunately, that latter group includes the U.S., Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Hungary, Poland and others, and the political leadership in those countries has become egotistic and takes care only of itself and its party's narrow interests.

The recipe to overcome Corona and restabilizing the world economy is not a mix of nationalism and ruthless capitalism. The world economy has already contracted, on average by more than 10% and the end is not yet in sight. I would forecast another significant chapter of world hunger that will encompass hundreds of millions of people. The total damage caused by famine is far greater than that of the pandemic. If the pandemic and a famine on its heels will increase inequality, the frustration and rage of the lower socioeconomic percentiles will increase, social cohesion will disintegrate and the trust in state institutions disappear. No one should be surprised if we wake one morning to see a wave of civil protests.

Lately we are witness to a new economic school of thought in the U.S. Those who think that the bottom line is not the only measure of corporate success and that employee, vendor and environment well being are valid and important measures as well. If this school of thought will find many supporters it is possible that ruthless capitalism will make way to liberal capitalism, one that encourages solidarity and mutual support. This kind of economy will increase equality and put larger burden on the rich to heal the economy, which in turn will encourage the public support in the state and government, ease the recovery process and speed it up.

[1] Massive famine is a persisting phenomenon in the world and usually a derivative of the phenomena discussed above.

[2] India is a democracy however under the Modi regime one can point towards a policy that increasingly leans towards the authoritarian and nationalistic direction.