Musings on Emergencies
When in danger, When in doubt,
Run in circles, Scream and shout!
-Original Source Unknown
As a writer, I am used to receiving criticism. It’s part of the job. People point out everything from spelling mistakes to factual inaccuracies all the time. It happens. I don’t mind it. But one comment that stuck in my mind came from a review of The Cowards Way of War. The United States Government I painted, the reviewer pointed out, was too efficient. Faced with a national – global, really – crisis, the government acted with stunning competence. The real government would be nowhere near as capable. It would be rather more like The Last Centurion.
It’s interesting to compare my fictional crisis with the COVID-19 epidemic, but also pointless. They’re not the same. The fictional crisis involved a weaponised bioweapon with known – and very lethal – qualities. COVID-19 was an unknown quantity, as far as the vast majority of people knew. It was hard to say just how bad it would be, at least at the start; a problem made worse by China and the WHO downplaying the crisis until it was too late to keep it confined to China. In hindsight, a great many mistakes were made. This is undeniable. But it is also undeniable that the decision-makers at the time did not have the advantage of hindsight. They had to make decisions based on what they knew at the time.
The problem with emergency planning – and emergency drills – is that they always leave out the emergency. There’s always a sense the drill isn’t real, no matter how intense it seems; there’s always an awareness the drill can be halted if something goes really wrong. You don’t set fire to a building to carry out a fire drill, for example; you don’t injure a patient to force a trainee doctor to make life-or-death decisions. Worse, perhaps, the drills are often deliberately slanted to make the participants look good. They assume that everyone will know what to do, that senior officers – however defined – will be there, that the chain of command will be clearly understood by everyone. This is unrealistic. There’s no guarantee that the senior officer will be there, let alone that he’ll make the right call.
And, of course, there’s no way to predict how people will react until they actually face a real emergency. Will they panic? Will they freeze? Will they go too far or will they not go far enough? Will they actually know what’s going on? Will they make the right call? There’s no way to know. Emergency drills can teach people what they should do in a crisis, but it’s never easy to tell if people are actually learning the right lessons. Even the most chaotic emergency drill is far more organised than a real emergency.
The problem facing decision-makers is two-fold. First, they must balance a set of competing requirements. Second, they must perform this balancing act while trying to ignore everyone who is trying to make political hay out of the crisis. The person on the spot does not have the luxury of doing nothing. He must make a decision, even though it may be the wrong decision. And he must be prepared to change his decision if new evidence suggests he made the wrong call, despite the certainty his enemies will mock him for changing his mind. It is simply not easy to realise what someone knew and didn’t know, even without the temptation to turn the disaster to political advantage. The seemingly-irrational decisions made by the Soviet Government shortly after the Chernobyl Disaster began make a great deal more sense if you realise the Soviet Government was seriously misinformed about the scale of the crisis.
The cold reality of emergency planning is that there is no way to do it perfectly. There will be problems caused by a lack of knowledge and resources. Even if the decision-makers have both, it will take time to get organised and actually put them to work. There will be losses. Whatever decision the decision-makers take, there will be serious consequences. People will die. And then the armchair generals, the people who don’t have the responsibility for dealing with the crisis, will point out – with the advantage of hindsight – how it could have been done better.
It is never easy to balance competing requirements. On one hand, putting the entire world into lockdown and ordering everyone to stay indoors would have stopped COVID-19 in short order. It made cold-blooded sense. The infected would either die or get better, but they wouldn’t spread the disease any further. However, on the other hand, this would utterly destroy the global economy and condemn millions of people to starvation. How many people keep even a week or two’s worth of food in their houses? If you refuse to let people leave the house for any reason at all, they’re going to starve. And this would lead, rapidly and inevitably, to a serious breakdown of law and order.
Governments needed, therefore, to strike a balance between closing everything down and keeping everything open, between running the risk of infecting everyone and ruining the economy beyond repair. This would not have been easy, even with perfect foresight. It wasn’t clear just how dangerous the virus truly was – and yes, this is still hotly debated – or what would need to be done to tackle it. And we had the sheer bad luck that this crisis exploded at the same time the media and large numbers of the political class were suffering from Trump/Boris Derangement Syndrome. Whatever Donald Trump and/or Boris Johnston did, it was going to be branded a mistake. Worse than a mistake (Trump’s early concern over the virus was branded racism). They would make the best calls they could, with the data they had on hand, only to be attacked for not knowing things they couldn’t know. This made it much harder to come to grips with the real crisis.
The sheer scale of the lockdown was beyond any emergency drills. Some effects were predictable, but were very much second-order priorities. Others didn’t make themselves apparent until it was too late to change course. The knock-on effects have been staggering and continue to be so. If businesses are not making money, they’re not paying wages; if workers are not getting paid, they’re not able to pay their rent; if landlords are not getting rent, they’re unable to pay their debts (mortgages) themselves; if mortgages are not getting paid, the banks might start to totter too. Governments have run around, trying desperately to fix the first set of problems … and then the problems caused by the first set of solutions. It’s easy to say that governments did mindlessly stupid things, or were guided by malice, but the blunt truth is that the scale of the crisis was so big that a lot of issues got overlooked until they bit. Hard.
And some of the problems were so big that they literally could not be handled.
It is not surprising that cracks started to appear very quickly. The lockdown depended on a great deal of public trust. This was lacking in both Britain and America. In Britain, the government’s response to the crisis appeared first lacklustre, then extreme. In America, the long-standing media war against President Trump ensured that, as I said above, whatever decisions he made would be the wrong decisions. The fact an election was brewing didn’t make life any easier for Trump, as it would be easy to blame him for every negative effect of the virus. (The constant lists of politicians from just about everywhere flouting the rules didn’t help.)
Worse, perhaps, the lockdown caused a great deal of stress for people. Being trapped in the house, unsure of where one stood … it can be maddening. People ask “do I still have a job? Will the landlord kick me out if I can’t make rent? Will I still go to college?” And then there’s the constant fear of neighbourhood snitches making a false – or inaccurate – report and getting someone in trouble. I’m not remotely surprised there’s been a string of incidents as stress and frustration starts to get out of hand. People who feel forced to bottle up their feelings can explode. The protest marches/riots following George Floyd’s death don’t really help. If protesting is perfectly fine, as politicians suggest, then so is reopening businesses and getting back to normal. If protesting is not fine, then why aren’t the protesters being stopped before they infect themselves and others? The damage this has done to their long-term credibility cannot be understated.
The blunt truth is that there probably wasn’t a good – i.e. perfect – way to handle this crisis. Whatever decisions were made, people were going to die. There were going to be a string of blunders that ensured more people would die – and yes, many of those deaths could have been avoided. And I think it is important that politicians – particularly the ones who want my vote – have to bear that in mind. It’s very easy to point and laugh from the sidelines, to pass judgement on someone when you’re not the one in the hot seat. It’s a great deal harder to handle a crisis when you’re the one in the hot seat.
