Isle be damned: Britain ravaged by covid-19

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. COVID-19 has hit Native American communities hit particularly hard. But it's not just lives being lost. A tribe's elders are not just the most susceptible to the disease, they're often the last people who know local customs, rituals, and even languages. And in China, a company's rubber stamp, or chop, is more official than any signature. Problem is, whoever holds the chop controls the company. And recently, that's led to some pretty interesting power grabs. But first— Tomorrow, Britain's Prime Minister will make an announcement on something dear to British hearts: the reopening of pubs. It's one part of the next stage of lockdown easing in England, which will come into effect on July 4th. Compared with the rest of Europe, Britain has been slow to reopen, in part because it was so slow to shut in the first place. As other countries first prepared their lockdown plans, there was a lot going on. On March 7th, the England-Wales rugby game in London, which the Prime Minister attended along with a crowd of 81,000. On March 13th, there was the Cheltenham Festival, one of the country's premier race meetings, which a quarter of a million people attended. And a day later, a packed-out concert by the Stereophonics in an arena in Cardiff. At the time, there was a sense that the government had things in hand. But now Britain has the highest death rate of any major country, and that early support has turned to anger and distrust.

Britain's done very badly in this pandemic.

Emma Duncan is The Economist's Britain editor.

Britons are— kind of irritated and frustrated to see pictures from mainland Europe of people in cafes and restaurants. And here people are pretty much still confined to their houses as far as entertainment goes. Non-essential shopping is just resuming.

Why is that the case? Why has Britain done so badly?

Britain has a certain number of disadvantages as far as COVID is concerned. Its capital is a very international city. People travel to and from London a lot. It's a very densely populated country. Both of those are bad for spreading a disease. The population of Britain is quite unhealthy compared to mainland Europe, and we have a fairly high proportion of ethnic minority people who seem to be more vulnerable to the disease. So that's the bad luck, but we've also had quite a lot of bad management, most of which comes under the heading of we've been very slow to do things. So we, we were slow to lock down, we were slow to get testing underway, slow to do contact tracing. Pretty much every area that you want to be quick on for an emergency like this, we were slow at.

And why do you suppose that is?

Some of it comes down to the sort of scientific advice that the government was getting. The scientists thought early on that the best thing to do would be to protect the most vulnerable people and let the disease spread through the rest of the population. And then in the middle of March, they were given some figures from Imperial College which said that if you do this, the National Health Service will be overwhelmed and around a quarter of a million people will die. So at that point, the government decided to take a stricter policy on what people could do. But even then, it was very slow. It was a week before Britain went into lockdown after that news came through. And that's a week that Neil Ferguson, the professor at Imperial College who did those calculations, said probably led to the deaths of 25,000 people.

But scientific advice is kind of only that, it's not policy in its own right.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. The government was responsible for making the policy and it should probably have probed the scientific advice that it was given more closely. And then if you look at the advice, the politicians tended to take the softer interpretation of it. And I think that's really understandable in a way because they wanted to protect the economy. And also, it's a liberal government. You know, Boris Johnson is a natural liberal, and he is not inclined towards, you know, putting his population under house arrest, which is in effect what he's had to do.

So as you say, there were economic considerations as well. I mean, how has Britain fared on that score?

Well, that's really interesting because, you know, people always talk about the trade-off between health and growth, as it were. But actually, that's not how it has worked out. In the rich world, governments have taken the view that they have to minimize the number of deaths, that the population won't put up with an elevated death rate. And so if your public health policy goes badly, as in this country, then you have to lock down for longer in order to get the death rate down. And so you mess up the economy as well. If you look at the countries that did well on the public health front, like South Korea and Germany, they've also done well on the economic front.

And so is the government coming in for blame on both of those scores?

It is.

The British population is not impressed. If you look at polling on how the government has done in this crisis across lots of different countries, Britain comes worst out of 22 countries, second bottom, just above Mexico. People have, to quite a large extent, lost trust in the government. So it's hard to know how the government is going to get people to do what it says from now on.

And so what are the implications of that then? We're still in the middle of it. We're still— well, speaking from our respective homes, how is this going to play out politically, do you think, for the government?

Well, it's going to stay with Boris, this one. I mean, he expected to be known as the Prime Minister who got Britain out of the European Union, and it now seems like clear that he will be known as the Prime Minister who messed up the COVID crisis and led to the largest number of civilian deaths from one event since the Second World War.

Do you believe a different leadership would have done differently, could have done better?

Yes, I do. I mean, if you look at what Jeremy Hunt, who was Boris Johnson's principal rival for the Tory leadership, was saying in the early days of the crisis, he was arguing for a quicker lockdown. He was pointing to the measures taken in East Asian countries and From everything he said then, we would have had a government that would have been quicker off the mark than our government has been.

I mean, is there any light at the end of this tunnel? Is there, there any way in which Britain is making up for what is quite literally lost time?

Well, the NHS has performed very well. There were worries that it would be overwhelmed, but it did an amazingly swift reorganisation at the beginning of this crisis. And it's in very good shape. We've had news of quite an exciting drug that Oxford University has identified, which reduces mortality among the sickest COVID patients by a third. That's very exciting. Oxford University is also in the forefront of a search for a vaccine. Those are the good points, but I'm afraid they're greatly outweighed by the government's mismanagement of the epidemic.

Emma, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks very much.

For a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to The Economist. To find the best introductory offer wherever you are, just go to economist.com/intelligenceoffer. This morning, the Navajo Nation comes out of a 57-hour-long curfew. The Native American tribe has had to reintroduce a lockdown to protect itself from rising COVID-19 infections outside the reservation in neighboring states. But even before the current wave, the Navajo had been hit hard by the pandemic. The territory has a higher death toll per person than any single American state.

I see patients very young in the hospital. I see 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, and majority of them have comorbidities.

Michelle Tom is a Navajo family doctor in Winslow, Arizona. Her patients aren't outliers. The Native American population has high numbers of preexisting conditions, making them more likely to develop severe symptoms.

I think as Native people, we have the highest rates than any other race for diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.

Even for those who aren't ill, the pandemic comes with high emotional and cultural cost in a community that passes down language and ceremonies by oral traditions.

This is more of a spiritual fatigue, just because I'm very strong in ties with my language and the kinship I have with my own people. And it's hard for me. It's very hard for me because, you know, our people, we don't— there's not many of us remaining.

The cultural threat in particular is acute. Very often we're talking about languages that are just spoken by a relatively small number of older people fluently. and those same older people are the only ones who remember earlier cultural touchstones, ceremonies, rites of passage, and so forth, that they then teach others in turn.

Lane Greene is The Economist's language columnist.

But when these few elders are themselves threatened by COVID-19, we have a very fragile culture where a lot of cultural knowledge can go very quickly.

And so how bad is the situation then among Native American communities?

Well, it's very hard to know with precision because different states count their Native American communities differently, but we do know that, for example, the Navajo Nation has over 6,000 cases of coronavirus infection and over 270 deaths. To put that in context, if that infection rate was that of a state, then we would have among the highest infection rate in the country, and if other tribes were counted as states, then the 5 most infected states in the United States would all be Indian tribes. New York State falling behind all 5 of those at place number 6.

And why is it that COVID-19 has been hitting these Native American groups so hard?

COVID-19 is a threat to Native Americans in particular because of a couple of things. Native Americans often live in very close communities. You have a lot of multigenerational households, so young people will go out and do the shopping, and they often have to go to very distant grocery stores. That's a hotspot for the virus itself, for transmission, and then they come home to these multigenerational households where they can easily pass it on to a grandparent, for example. In addition, there's a lot of pre-existing health conditions, diabetes and other things that make the coronavirus infection more deadly. Compounding these problems are some factors that made responding to the coronavirus early more difficult. For example, internet access, which most people in rich households take for granted, is a lot more scant on the ground among Native Americans. So information about the virus was slow to spread, and when people did hear about it, they didn't necessarily know what to trust. And then things like shared water facilities where you don't necessarily have clean water, you often have very dirty groundwater, and in some cases polluted from things like nuclear waste, and you might have a tap shared among a very large number of people, which obviously increases chances for infection as well. So these are all factors, they're all born of poverty, but they're all specific to making makes the transmission of a virus through the community more likely.

So restricted access to food, to water, to internet.

What about to healthcare?

That's another major problem. So Native Americans are covered by a patchwork of different services. Probably the most famous one is a thing called the Indian Health Service, which is a sort of federal program that is, by various treaties with the tribes, required to cover Native Americans. But the problem is that it is not like Medicare and Medicaid in America, which are essentially a mandated benefit. The federal government is required to spend as much as it takes to take care of Medicaid patients. And if that number goes up because more people are sick, then the spending goes up automatically. By contrast, the IHS, Indian Health Service, gets a block grant from Congress each year, and that's regardless of how many people are actually sick. And this number has actually been increasing slightly, but it has been insufficient for Native American needs for years. And now it doesn't grow automatically when you have, say, a major pandemic, a major health crisis. Causing a lot more people to get sick. So the system is underfunded. Some Native Americans also have recourse either to Medicaid, which is the system for poorer Americans, or recourse to Medicare, which is for the elderly. But very often they're far, far away from providers, and particularly specialist providers.

It sounds like these communities are largely left to their own devices. I mean, how have they dealt with the pandemic response, with lockdowns and the like?

Well, by and large, the tribal leaders got on board early and they realized this was a real threat to their communities. Uniquely so. And so they order lockdowns when the states were told to lock down. When elders and tribal leaders said, listen, we need to lock down, we need to have curfews, people by and large did comply. And so that helped. We had a very big early wave of spread, and that's hit, for example, the Navajo Nation in the Southwest extremely hard. But since that happened, people understand that they need to comply in order to save their lives, and so they have been doing that.

And so all told, you think that these structural weaknesses, the danger that the pandemic presents in particular for older people, comes at a real cost for Native American communities.

Absolutely. I spoke to a member of the Spokane Salish people in the Pacific Northwest called Barry Moses, who is a historian and a bit of an activist for the people in trying to keep the cultural memory going. And he's told me when he was learning about the language, he read an interesting 100-year-old phraseology regarding how in the Spokane Salish language you say someone got sick and you literally say that someone was greeted by an illness. And he thought this was maybe flowery or poetic, but it was really just using the standard word for to greet, as in to greet another person. So he asked another elder where that came from, and he said, in our people's culture, a sickness is seen as an entity, like another person or an animal or a spirit, while they are an enemy because they can harm us, that an enemy is to be treated not with fear, but with respect. And he said this is the kind of cultural memory that he just by chance elicited from his uncle. But every one of those elders who is passing away is taking those memories with them.

Lane, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

In much of Asia and elsewhere, rubber stamps or chops appear on just about every import. Important business document. Chops represent a legally binding, all-powerful signature. These company seals can cause a stir, though. In 2007, Russian police seized stamps from an investment firm and used them to re-register its companies under different names. Russia has since abolished the requirement for chops, but there's been no such change in China, where corporations are still in choppy waters.

The chop in China is basically everything for companies.

Simon Rabinovich is our Asia economics editor based in Shanghai.

It's a tradition that goes back more than 2,000 years. This was what emperors would stamp their edicts with. But in the present day, it's what companies stamp every contract, every tax return, every customs filing with. And basically, whoever controls the chop controls the company.

And so how is it then that the power of the chop or of the chops has been abused?

In the last 3 months, there have been 3 quite high-profile disputes which have all to certain degrees revolved around the power of the chop. So the first one was back in April. Li Guoqin, who is an ousted founder of Dangdang, which used to be quite a popular e-commerce company, broke into the company's head office and walked out with dozens of the company's chops. The company tried to deem them to be invalid, but the police don't want to wade into what they see as an intra-company dispute. So it's then left to the shareholders to either deal with it through negotiations or to take it through the court system. But that's quite difficult. And so it's a problem that could drag on for several weeks, if not months now.

But you say there have been other examples recently.

There have been a couple of other ongoing disputes as well. So one involves the Chinese joint venture of Arm, a big chip designer. It tried in early June to fire its CEO in China, Mr. Alan Wu. The board agreed to do that. The only problem is that Mr. Wu is still officially the legal rep. He still controls the company Chomps, and so he's putting out statements in the name of Arm China. And then another ongoing dispute involves Bitmain, which is one of the world's biggest makers of Bitcoin mining machines. And the two founders there have been going at it for control of Bitmain. About two weeks ago, one founder who had been ousted announced that he had regained control of the company, and as a sign of that, he said that he now had new CHOPs. The old CHOPs were invalid. The other founder said, in fact, the existing CHOPs were still valid. So it's a fight for the control of the company, but it's waged through control of who actually has the rightful CHOP.

So do you see no sign then that the CHOP will ever be for the CHOP in China?

I think the CHOP is here to stay, but clearly there is this dissonance, if you will, between a country that is racing towards a high-tech future and the idea that this kind of single physical object confers so much power. So what is happening is they're beginning to roll out electronic CHOPs. And so the idea is, in the way that electronic signatures are becoming more prevalent as well, if you have the authority as recognized by your company's IT system, you then have access to the electronic CHOP. And then if that person is released for whatever reason or is fired, then the IT privileges giving them access to the electronic CHOP can be stripped away as well. So they're not going to fade away, but the idea is that they will be modernized.

Simon, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.