Getty Images / Kieran Walsh

In 2014, I travelled to Bangkok to meet Larry Brilliant, the epidemiologist who led the World Health Organisation team in south Asia that eradicated smallpox. Brilliant was in Bangkok as part of a mission to bring together government, private sector and citizens to develop digital tools for the early detection of outbreaks of infectious diseases. There was excitement about how mobile healthcare apps could be used to assist public health officials in spotting early indicators of deadly pathogens.

Following the outbreak of Sars in 2002 and of swine flu seven years later, governments across the world had promised action to prevent the widespread dissemination of zoonotic diseases. As the crises passed, however, governments moved on to other matters. It wasn’t until 2014, when the Obama administration set up a fund to support low-income countries grappling with the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, that an international effort was established.


In Bangkok, one of the messages that Brilliant and his team repeated time and again was that any effort to prevent the spread of a fast-moving pathogen must be transnational. Geographic boundaries exist, but the world's topography can be mapped another way – through infrastructure. The spread of pathogens is possible because of our highly interconnected world. In the case of Sars, a patient at a hospital in Guangzhou passed the infection on to a doctor, who then travelled to a wedding in Hong Kong. He then passed the disease to a number of guests at the hotel where he was staying. One of them was a 78-year-old Canadian who flew back to Toronto and died eleven days later after passing the condition on to her son. The virus then spread throughout the hospital where the son was treated. Over the following weeks there were at least six transmission chains in Canada; 400 people became seriously ill, 25,000 were placed in quarantine and 44 died.

If the Covid-19 crisis has taught us anything, it’s that highly-functioning state governance matters. And, more than that, responding to highly infectious diseases requires an exceptionally coordinated international response. However, the epidemic has arrived at a time where many states have turned inward. The fracturing of the US-China relationship, the rise of populism in Europe, Brexit Britain, an isolationist United States, nationalist India, a secretive and authoritarian China, and Russia toying with decoupling itself from the global internet are destabilising forces at a time when cooperation is imperative.

Read next How CRISPR is helping scientists create a better coronavirus test How CRISPR is helping scientists create a better coronavirus test

Trust and transparency are crucial assets for western democracies, but in China the attitude to governance is different: control is paramount. Recent reports suggest that China may not have been open with the global community regarding the scale and severity of the outbreak. According to Bloomberg, US Intelligence sources reported that “China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease.”

“I think this will do more to speed up the decoupling process than Donald Trump would have ever been able to secure,” says Steve Tsang, the Director of the China Institute at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas). “When this is over, I would not be surprised if, not only the US, but governments in Europe will start to review their relationship and policies towards China.”


Over the past year, the trade war between Washington and Beijing has threatened to fracture the relationship between the two largest economies in the world. While there has been no food crisis in industrialised nations, there have been shortages – both of vital commodities such as medical equipment and of vital information – that hampered the global effort. This calls into question the role of the state in both the free market, liberal economies of the west and that of the one-party, command and control version in China.

“The decoupling process began with the US-China trade war and the coronavirus, in the short term, accentuates the tendency for that policy to be supported,” says Yukon Huang, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and formerly the World Bank's country director for China. “People [in the US] are going to be looking at the virus and question the [lack of] availability of medicines, equipment and masks. Why is it [that] the US doesn't have the capacity to produce some of these things in bulk?”

The reason western nations, not just the US, have experienced shortfalls of both protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers and the necessary medicines and chemicals to make, for instance, hand sanitiser, is the same as reason that your iPhone is made in Shenzhen: globalisation has meant that manufacturers in multiple sectors – from electronics to apparel, packaged goods to healthcare – have pursued the relatively cheap costs of labour available in China. Yuang points out that, in a time of crisis, the state has a critical role to play in ensuring that vital goods such as medicines are available. In the west, major pharmaceutical companies focus research and production on new, branded drugs that are highly profitable. Reproducing generic drugs isn’t a money spinner. This means that production of basic drugs falls to countries such as China and India – which manufactures 70 per cent of the UK’s paracetamol – where the mass volume of production makes it economically feasible.

Read next Stay Alert never made sense and now we’ve got the data to prove it Stay Alert never made sense and now we’ve got the data to prove it

“The decoupling issue is not a straightforward issue of saying we should have the capacity here in the US to produce vital supplies,” Yuang says. “The question is, how do you make sure it's available? And, if you do want to make sure you have the capacity to produce this, who is going to cover the costs? Private companies won't do this on their own.”


The devastating impact of the coronavirus on the healthcare systems of the western world isn’t just a medical and human catastrophe. It also undermines democratic states in multiple and varied ways: resources are diminished, economies weakened, trust is devalued. This last part is perhaps the most damning aspect of President Donald Trump’s dismal handling of the crisis: having spent the past four years pouring scorn on expertise and dismantling government agencies, his reelection chances are now dependent on those very agencies he has undermined. The logical end-point of Trump’s mendacity and advocacy for cuckoo conspiracy theories is that Anthony Fauci, the expert on infectious diseases who has led America’s response to the crisis, now faces threats to his safety.

The Chinese response – initial obfuscation before mobilisation at speed, a ruthless enforcement of lockdowns, leveraging surveillance as a function of contact tracing, cracking down on dissent, preventing the spread of information that could lead to panic – has been followed by an all-out hearts and minds campaign intended to persuade the global community of its good intentions.

“When the Chinese government started to take the virus seriously in late January, they set up a top-level committee of nine people: in that committee of nine, there's one

member who has public health in her portfolio,” says Steve Tsang from Soas. “One for the economy, one for public security, one for Central Office, one for the State Council central office, one for foreign affairs, one for the city of Beijing – and believe it or not – two responsible for propaganda. That doesn't mean that public health or the economy was not a priority – they clearly were as they were represented. But the top priority was propaganda and controlling the narrative. They wanted to distract attention from earlier failures.”

Supplies of equipment such as ventilators and masks to countries such as the Netherlands, Italy and Greece can be viewed either as humanitarian efforts intended to strengthen China’s soft power, or ways of leveraging its influence in areas such as decisions around 5G networks or advocacy for its Belt and Road initiative. There is also a question around the efficacy of some of the equipment – much is being produced by Chinese companies who don’t have official certification and may fabricate products that won’t protect frontline health workers to the highest standards. “When it's over, I think [western] governments will be thinking about that,” Tsang says. “They will be thinking: how much can we trust this relationship? When push comes to shove we have seen what happens.”

Read next The rules suggest homes are Covid hotspots but the data isn’t so clear The rules suggest homes are Covid hotspots but the data isn’t so clear

But there have been exploits that can’t be classified as soft power exercises: one senior figure in the Chinese foreign ministry tweeted the baseless claim that: “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!” Earlier this month, Beijing’s refusal to renew the press credentials of thirteen journalists, including reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, demonstrated that Chinese authorities were unwilling to tolerate scrutiny at a time when the West could learn lessons from the country’s response to Covid-19. In this circumstance, Trump – naturally – employs the language of prejudice, employing the phrase “Chinese virus” as a way of apportioning blame and practicing his own unique form of social distancing by removing himself from his on comments, at a rally on Charleston on February 28, about the coronavirus being a “hoax”.

This crisis was an opportunity for the US to lead the world, as it did in 2014, in the global response to Ebola. Instead, the White House realised the severity of the crisis and the impact on the health and welfare of its citizens woefully late. More than that, it now finds itself fighting the pandemic at a time when China has seemingly emerged from the worst and is attempting to control the narrative regarding its own missteps and possible cover-ups, while love-bombing other nations with assistance and expertise.

This will be even more in evidence as the pandemic reaches parts of the developing world with inadequate healthcare systems and states that will be quickly overwhelmed by what is to come. The next wave of the coronavirus is likely to hit the most vulnerable nations the hardest – many people in continental Africa don’t have access to the information and services provided by the internet. Populous cities such as Cairo, Lagos and Kinshasa provide the perfect environments for a highly transmissible disease.

“Europe, essentially, is unable to fill the void and China will be the only major power that will provide some kind of medical supplies to large areas in Africa and the Middle East where they simply cannot get anything,” Tsang says. “Your unsafe face mask is still better than no face mask. Your unreliable test kit is better than no test kit. I can see China benefiting from that.”

In a world that’s every more connected, in which data is more freely available than at any time before, where researchers are able to leverage technology such as machine learning to understand the spread of the pathogen, to save lives and – perhaps – develop a vaccine, the response to the pandemic has been localised rather than global. And, in many territories, the response of large organisations has been to move much faster than some governments to keep their teams safe and limit the spread of the virus. Europe, the continent that prides itself on public healthcare and generous social welfare systems, has proved itself unprepared, potentially ushering in an era of localised manufacturing and deglobalised supply chains.

Read next ‘A chaotic mess’: The UK’s Covid-19 testing programme is falling apart ‘A chaotic mess’: The UK’s Covid-19 testing programme is falling apart

“This crisis will likely lead European nations and others to reconsider the extent of supply chain dependence on either the US or China since Covid-19 is, among other things, a shock that has disrupted supply chains,” says Linda Yueh, the Chair of the LSE Economic Diplomacy Commission. “This crisis will likely accelerate that process – along with additive manufacturing and other technological developments – towards greater localisation.”

Every government, in different ways, has had to play a game of catch-up in order to respond to the challenges of this unparalleled – but not unforeseen, or unforeseeable – public health emergency. “We have done very poorly in terms of preparing for it,” Tsang says. “Considering that all NATO countries and the Five Eyes have for years been considering a pandemic as a major security challenge. When it came we were completely unprepared.” The UK’s initial muddled and contradictory response has come under fire for the lack of protective equipment and repeated failure to source testing kits for frontline staff. The Prime Minister’s promise to “massively ramp up” testing for NHS workers will come too late for many.

As the aggregates of the demand side of the economy – capital spending, consumption, exports – contract, it’s possible that Asian countries that responded so effectively to the virus might be most affected in the medium term as their economies are dependent on trade. “Since China is the single largest beneficiary of globalisation, it’s likely to be the largest loser,” Tsang says, with a caveat that in the short to medium term, its manufacturing sector will benefit.

In the coming weeks, trust will be all. If the UK government continues on its current worrying trajectory of failing to deliver on vital equipment for NHS workers, its entire policy of social distancing will come into question. If citizens lose faith, then the epidemic will be much worse. The larger context is the legacy that we will be left with. Following China’s successful use of surveillance, it’s not inconceivable that Europe will regulate this technology less robustly than it would a year ago; China may learn that transparency is more powerful than shipping masks to Europe; the White House that science and strong institutions have their place. Supply chains will be shorter. Medical supplies will be stockpiled. The immediate crisis will be averted, beyond that, we will demand that the government layers resilience through every aspect of our society.

Greg Williams is WIRED's editor-in-chief. He tweets from @GregWilliams718

Read next The big problem with Operation Moonshot? False positives The big problem with Operation Moonshot? False positives

Coronavirus coverage from WIRED

😓 How did coronavirus start and what happens next?

❓ Does alcohol kill coronavirus? The biggest myths, busted

🎮 World of Warcraft perfectly predicted our coronavirus panic


✈️ Flight data shows the huge scale of Covid-19

👉 Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn