What is the COVID-19 experience teaching us about collaboration and societal adaption?

A sociological observation of our current societal response

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is now our new reality. Even after three months of collective COVID-19 experience, the pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its implications are difficult to grasp.

Daily Coronavirus tickers, so called reality checks by renowned media and global situation reports seem like markers of contradicting realities. It resembles what Edgar Allen Poe described in his famous poem “A dream in a dream”: a man’s struggle to deal with his observations of reality that are confronted with the effects of time. The poem displays the systems-questioning experience, societies are going through in times of massive disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic elicits clashes of conflicting narratives and fuels our search for resilience.

How does our societal response to the pandemic look like and what are emerging lessons to positively influence a global coordinated response to the COVID-19 experience across national borders? The following deliberations aim for offering a sociological observation.

The COVID-19 experience

From the first case of SARS-CoV-2 that was traced back to 17 November 2020 in China [i] to the official announcement by the World Health Organization to declare the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (30 January 2020), cases were confirmed in 18 other countries [ii]. Two months later (31 March 2020), COVID-19 was affecting more than 200 countries and territories [iii]. Within this period, countries around the world have gone into lockdown and introduced confinement measures to contain the pandemic. By end of March 2020, close to 3.5 billion people were living in confinement [iv].

Photo by Jordan Hopkins on Unsplash

The social response to COVID-19 can be technically described as an “experience” and as such as a collective observation and response to an unprecedented disruption with open end. The sudden publicly experienced armed police, facial recognition cameras or self-isolation and physical distancing controls are certainly co-constructing new realities. These are not only side-effects of the current trans-sectoral disruption but also perpetuate an unprecedented interruption of ingrained social patterns.

At the micro-level, we witness the dynamics of societal adaptation in the sudden interruption of routines and norms.

Referring to the context of European countries, three examples are:

1. Physical proximity when meeting with friends and family is replaced with physical distancing, normed by new political regulations between 1.5 and 2 meters. Greeting rituals like friendly kissing, once an expression of respect appreciation, became at one blow symbols of disrespect and anti-solidarity. And, face masks are now a social sign for risk mitigation compliance, despite varying recommendations.
2. In case of mandatory confinement, freely moving around outside one’s home transformed into subject of (tight) restrictions, supported by unprecedented surveillance.
3. Norms of what we should be doing online and what requires in person interaction were rearranged [v]. We are learning new etiquettes for how to communicate within online gatherings such as webinars and are developing new expectations on how the known and unknown is communicated.

At the macro-level, the COVID-19 experience scrutinizes so called non-sustainable practices. COVID-19 challenges our use of global resources and is accelerating a discussion around the rationales of global health diplomacy.

In this crisis many countries attempt to respond in isolation to the pandemic; their approach to this crisis could be considered a reiteration of disunity and inequities that already challenged global health governance before COVID-19. One example is the withdrawal of American funding to the leading international health diplomacy institution, the World Health Organization (WHO), on 14 April 2020. This withdrawal expresses how a global governance system based on domestic administration discourages supranational collective capacities. Such an approach is in particular harmful at times where rapid responsiveness would be needed.

In this context, nationalism and institutionalized discrimination intensify. The central place of human rights in global health diplomacy becomes more visible. For instance, migrants and refugees are currently confined in the name of protecting national populations against the virus. Their human right to asylum is partially suspended which makes their access to safeguarding health care almost impossible [vi].

It may be regarded as an aggravating factor for sustainable global health diplomacy that — for the time being — no international health governance body provides strategic guidance on the protection of human rights [vii].

Implementing a human rights-based approach in our pandemic-response at an international diplomacy level by a coordinated health governance body would help to address the societal challenge of reducing health inequalities.

An unexpected new crisis? Not quite

On the global stage, the narrative of COVID-19 as t-h-e disruption of the 21st century stepped forward while obscuring — during the first moments of shock — the failures of our globalised systems before coronavirus. The Sustainable Development Reports from 2016 to 2019 suggested that high-income countries endanger sustainable development [viii]. They failed in different areas of global scope by not addressing socio-economic spill-over effects on developing countries nor sufficiently introducing effective climate action. It is these very countries that are now dominantly shaping the global discourse on COVID-19 and, for the moment, are reporting the highest case numbers world-wide.

In the Global North initial response to the pandemic, the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ were an important figure to mark the disruption. Normal referred to the time before the corona pandemic and ‘abnormal’ to the time when the global crisis “started”. This dichotomy, the old “normal” and the new “crisis” (the abnormal), can be found in many political statements, in media coverage and scientific papers about the coronavirus.

However, connotating the time before corona as “normal” appears paradox when observing that ecological destruction, growing socio-economic inequalities, or fractured political governance were characteristics of a systemic crisis before COVID-19.

Labelling COVID-19 as an ‘unexpected event’ functioned as a powerful narrative to justify initial shortcomings in previsioning measures for risk and crisis management. What was ‘unexpected’ was its timing and magnitude. Even though the world witnessed several infectious disease outbreaks since the start of the 21st century, namely Ebola, Influenza A (H1N1), SARS, MERS, and Zika virus, their impact and likelihood continued to be underestimated. They have shown that we don’t have the capacity to avoid outbreaks and that their consequences are hard to regulate.

South-Korea, Singapore and Taiwan read the signs of a possibly approaching pandemic and made use of their collective memory of SARS in 2002 when managing outbreaks uncertainty. They followed the rationale that pandemic crisis management is the most effective just before the potential danger becomes actual. South-Korea implemented proactive testing early on, Taiwan had a disaster management centre in place that focuses on large-outbreak responses and allowed for quickly producing and implementing a list of actions to protect public health, and Singapore made testing widely available and quarantine rules clear. For these countries, the COVID-19 experience was not an ‘unexpected’ crisis but potential threat.

Technical preparedness measures are just a starting point

The social impact of political interpretation and communication of the COVID-19 experience has put those countries that theoretically had the most important measures of health security in place, into a roller coaster of fake news on social media, mixed with officially approved information which complicated preventive care and coordinated national response. According to the Global Health Security (GHS) Index, the first wide-ranging assessment and benchmarking of health security across 195 countries, the US, the UK and the Netherlands are the ones most prepared [ix].

Dominated by neoliberal policies and a crisis of capitalism, these three countries emphasised long before COVID-19 the free market rather than the right to health or education [x]. Their initial responses to the spread of COVID-19 were strongly criticized [xi] and demonstrate the social bill of neoliberalism.

• The UK did not introduce lockdowns but a risk narrative around “herd immunity” when first cases were confirmed.
• The Netherlands followed a similar approach: developing herd immunity among lower risk groups and protecting vulnerable and older people [xii].
• The US dismissed the threat — one day after the WHO announced, global pandemic’s risk was high, and communicated “having it totally under control” [xiii]. Two month later, with more than 100,000 confirmed cases, “bellicose mobilization” replaced the no risk narrative with the narrative of control [xiv].

The US’ and UK’s top marks on GHS Index categories ‘prevention’, ‘detection’ and ‘rapid response’ contrasted with their actual crisis management during the early days, demonstrates how political leadership’s risk interpretation and communication shape a country’s functional adaptivity and resilience.

Pandemics and epidemics are not only about the spread of pathogens and diseases, they are also about decisions, understood as communicated choices[xv].

Technical preparedeness for a pandemic like COVID-19 requires to be complemented with clear decision-making strategies on response-narratives to better support collaboration within and across countries. To be clear: from the very moment, that the ‘authority over interpretation’ (for instance politicians, epidemiologists etc.) is not being called into question, something like a narrative seduction takes place.

• It’s a normative and political decision which narratives are to be established when a potential public health threat emerges.
• It’s a decision not to publish data and modelling-information, used to decide a political course of action.
• It’s a decision to focus public communication on the failures of other countries rather than lessons learnt.

Questioning who establishes which narrative in the response to COVID-19 helps us to detect political strategies behind resilience-building, vulnerability reduction or sustainable development.

Conclusion: Four key elements to encourage a sustainable and resilient response to COVID-19 and future disruptions

The COVID-19 experience demonstrates that we are living in a highly interconnected and complex world with systemic risks that are not constrained by specific locality but occur eco-centric. Whether within an international call against ‘the transmission of the virus’ or a national appeal towards ‘solidarity against the effects of recession’, resilience-building seems to become part of our COVID-19 narratives.

Strengthen resilience at all societal levels

Originally developed within ecological disaster research [xvi], resilience today, understood as the capacity to respond to and recover from threat [xvii], experiences a renaissance, legitimating an ideology of preserving systems at times of permanent crisis. With COVID-19, responsibilities for building resilience are assgined at different levels: in light of COVID-19, Deloitte and the World Economic Forum demand resilient leadership of senior executives [xviii], the Global Resilience Index benchmarks business resiliency across countries [xix], and United Nations’ Secretary-General António Guterres appeals the international community to build resilient societies [xx]. In fact, resilience building concerns all of us.

• Depending on how we evaluate the strains on economic, educational and health systems, we are able to address far-reaching risks and challenges: non sustainable supply chains, amplification of social inequalities, higher vulnerability of marginalised groups or reduced access to health and education services, to name a few [xxi]. These are the very challenges that the international community agreed to address within the Agenda 2030.
• Resilience approaches shape power and communicative structures, spanning from ‘managing the human side of upheaval with emotional intelligence’ to ‘applying the Agenda 2030 as roadmap towards recovery from a crisis’. Because these approaches influence our global discourse around the COVID-19 uncertainty, they also impact the horizon of possibilities.
• Resilience building provides us with greater global awareness of our vulnerability and capabilities to respond to massive distruptions. The COVID-19 experience is an opportuntiy to rethink global health diplomacy and our ways of collaboration in general in times of crisis.

Appreciate and incorporate more interdisciplinary expertise

• Interdisciplinary collaboration is the only way to address appropriately the complex and interconnected challenges of today, including COVID-19. In particular the stronger integration of social sciences is indespensible when strategies for sustainable development are formed. There was a tendency in social sciences to study globalization with its distributional aspects, but recent focus turned towards issues of systemic instability generated by the new level of connectedness. These efforts included risk analysis that teaches us to acknowledge how social problems are constructed and how responses to these problems reflect social orders.
• By generating qualitative and quantitative data on social variation of risk vulnerability across populations, inequalities can be detected. For instance, research on the COVID-19 experience provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 affects specific groups of populations disproportionately; not only epidemiological but also socially. By looking at specific public discourses for narratives which function as driving forces for change, we can explore e.g. how risk perception influences decisions [xxii] and inform policy-makers accordingly.
• Another opportunity can be seen in the interdisciplinary modelling of social network behaviour or dynamics simulation of complex systems. They help to better understand interdependencies within and between systems. In particular social-cultural approaches provide the necessary theoretical frameworks, allowing for processing risks either as a threat or an opportunity.

Leverage opportunities provided by virtualization

We have now entered, Risk Society 4.0. It refers to what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck called a societal consequence of processing insecurities and hazards introduced by modernization itself. Beck explains the Risk Society by means of the “reflexive modernization”-concept, where unintended and unforeseen side-effects of modern life have reverse effects on modernity, questioning the very basis of its functioning. While in the past, digitization has completely penetrated society, it is now virtualization that is stirring up our social fabric [xxiii]. Gradually, innovation that builds on consensus, virtual and open source, and collective intelligence is accelerating the integration of a fourth sector, consisting of for-benefit platforms that innovate trans-sectoral. Now, adding 4.0 as a suffix to Beck’s diagnosis, recognizes society’s evolution towards a new era of far-reaching digital transformation.

• By means of new technologies like the Internet of Things, deep data, Blockchain, quantum computing, etc., not only our approaches of managing side-effects of modernization are changing (such as COVID-19), we are also triggering new threats, including cybersecurity breaches or poor data quality — risks that could be responded to within new forms of collaboration.
• Virtualization is bringing forward new work space solutions, remote learning environments and is forcing behavioural changes on how we gather information. One example are hackathons. While hackathons represented a venue for collaboration of people mainly with technical backgrounds, the COVID-19 experience led to a stronger diversification in expertise within such fora, as entrepreneurs, social and natural scientists are joining now these intense brainstorming and development sessions. The Global Hack with over 12,000 participants from 100+ countries developing 500 projects [xxiv], but also national hackathons like the German “We vs Virus” with almost 43,000 participants working on 810 projects, show the mobilisation and potential of virtual collaboration for a risk response [xxv].
• Leveraging hackathons and other collective intelligence-based microcosms (interactive webinar discussions) as solutions-building platforms provide policy-makers with an opportunity to identify risk-mitigation tools in a more responsive manner.

Improve the process of decision-making in risk management

• Decision makers in governments, the private sector, civil society organizations and academia need develop a more multi-disciplinary response mechanism with clear frameworks around responsibilities and priorities.
• The proliferation of uncertainties and concomitant social awareness thereof demand for internationally coordinated research and development on the effects of systemic risks such as infectious diseases.
• Such endeavours must include human-rights based assessments of structural vulnerability.

In our alleged quest to find the holy grail of sustainability and resilience, the COVID-19 experience challenges us to reflect on radical changes necessary to cope with the vulnerabilities and inequalities we are confronted with.

COVID-19 is the biggest social experiment of our times that will either strengthen our social immune system against future threats or sacrifice the potential of global social solidarity for the sake of a system of privilege.