Nobody denies that Chinese officials’ initial effort to cover up the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan at the turn of the year was an appallingly misguided decision. But anyone who is still focusing on China’s failings instead of working toward a solution is essentially making the same mistake.
STOCKHOLM – Does Sweden’s decision to spurn a national lockdown offer a distinct way to fight COVID-19 while maintaining an open society? The country’s unorthodox response to the coronavirus is popular at home and has won praise in some quarters abroad. But it also has contributed to one of the world’s highest COVID-19 death rates, exceeding that of the United States.
In Stockholm, bars and restaurants are filled with people enjoying the spring sun after a long, dark winter. Schools and gyms are open. Swedish officials have offered public-health advice but have imposed few sanctions. No official guidelines recommend that people wear masks.
During the pandemic’s early stages, the government and most commentators proudly embraced this “Swedish model,” claiming that it was built on Swedes’ uniquely high levels of “trust” in institutions and in one another. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven made a point of appealing to Swedes’ self-discipline, expecting them to act responsibly without requiring orders from authorities.
According to the World Values Survey, Swedes do tend to display a unique combination of trust in public institutions and extreme individualism. As sociologist Lars Trägårdh has put it, every Swede carries his own policeman on his shoulder.
But let’s not turn causality on its head. The government did not consciously design a Swedish model for confronting the pandemic based on trust in the population’s ingrained sense of civic responsibility. Rather, actions were shaped by bureaucrats and then defended after the fact as a testament to Swedish virtue.
In practice, the core task of managing the outbreak fell to a single man: state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell at the National Institute of Public Health. Tegnell approached the crisis with his own set of strong convictions about the virus, believing that it would not spread from China, and later, that it would be enough to trace individual cases coming from abroad. Hence, the thousands of Swedish families returning from late-February skiing in the Italian Alps were strongly advised to return to work and school if not visibly sick, even if family members were infected. Tegnell argued that there were no signs of community transmission in Sweden, and therefore no need for more general mitigation measures. Despite Italy’s experience, Swedish ski resorts remained open for vacationing and partying Stockholmers.
Between the lines, Tegnell indicated that eschewing draconian policies to stop the spread of the virus would enable Sweden gradually to achieve herd immunity. This strategy, he stressed, would be more sustainable for society.
Through it all, Sweden’s government remained passive. That partly reflects a unique feature of the country’s political system: a strong separation of powers between central government ministries and independent agencies. And, in “the fog of war,” it was also convenient for Löfven to let Tegnell’s agency take charge. Its seeming confidence in what it was doing enabled the government to offload responsibility during weeks of uncertainty. Moreover, Löfven likely wanted to demonstrate his trust in “science and facts,” by not – like US President Donald Trump – challenging his experts.
It should be noted, though, that the state epidemiologist’s policy choice has been strongly criticized by independent experts in Sweden. Some 22 of the country’s most prominent professors in infectious diseases and epidemiology published a commentary in Dagens Nyheter calling on Tegnell to resign and appealing to the government to take a different course of action.
By mid-March, and with wide community spread, Löfven was forced to take a more active role. Since then, the government has been playing catch-up. From March 29, it prohibited public gatherings of more than 50 people, down from 500, and added sanctions for noncompliance. Then, from April 1, it barred visits to nursing homes, after it had become clear that the virus had hit around half of Stockholm’s facilities for the elderly.
Sweden’s approach turned out to be misguided for at least three reasons. However virtuous Swedes may be, there will always be free riders in any society, and when it comes to a highly contagious disease, it doesn’t take many to cause major harm. Moreover, Swedish authorities only gradually became aware of the possibility of asymptomatic transmission, and that infected individuals are most contagious before they start showing symptoms. And, third, the composition of the Swedish population has changed.
After years of extremely high immigration from Africa and the Middle East, 25% of Sweden’s population – 2.6 million of a total population of 10.2 million – is of recent non-Swedish descent. The share is even higher in the Stockholm region. Immigrants from Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan are highly overrepresented among COVID-19 deaths. This has been attributed partly to a lack of information in immigrants’ languages. But a more important factor seems to be the housing density in some immigrant-heavy suburbs, enhanced by closer physical proximity between generations.
It is too soon for a full reckoning of the effects of the “Swedish model.” The COVID-19 death rate is nine times higher than in Finland, nearly five times higher than in Norway, and more than twice as high as in Denmark. To some degree, the numbers might reflect Sweden’s much larger immigrant population, but the stark disparities with its Nordic neighbors are nonetheless striking. Denmark, Norway, and Finland all imposed rigid lockdown policies early on, with strong, active political leadership.
Now that COVID-19 is running rampant through nursing homes and other communities, the Swedish government has had to backpedal. Others who may be tempted by the “Swedish model” should understand that a defining feature of it is a higher death toll.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/3/31/21199874/coronavirus-spanish-flu-social-distancing
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A study of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic finds that cities with stricter social distancing reaped economic benefits.
For much of the past month, some commentators have defended the effort to promote social distancing, including the near-shutdown of huge swaths of America’s economy, as the lesser of two evils: Yes, asking or forcing people to remain in their homes for as much of the day as possible will slow economic activity, the argument goes. But it’s worth it for the public health benefits of slowing the coronavirus’s spread.
This argument has, naturally, led to a backlash, explained here by my colleague Ezra Klein. Critics — including the president — have argued that the cure is worse than the disease, and mass death from coronavirus is a price we need to be willing to pay to keep the American economy from cratering.
Both these viewpoints obscure an important possibility: The social distancing regime may well be optimal not just from a public health point of view, but from an economic perspective as well.
Economists Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner released a working paper (not yet peer-reviewed) last week that makes this argument extremely persuasively. The three analyzed the 1918-1919 flu pandemic in the United States, as the closest (though still not identical) analogue to the current crisis. They compare cities in 1918-’19 that adopted quarantining and social isolation policies earlier to ones that adopted them later.
Their conclusion? “We find that cities that intervened earlier and more aggressively do not perform worse and, if anything, grow faster after the pandemic is over.”
The researchers refer to such social distancing policies as NPIs, or “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” essentially public health interventions not achieved through medication, like quarantines and school and business closures. The key to the paper is their observation that, in theory, NPIs can both decrease economic activity directly, by keeping people in certain jobs from going to work, and increase it indirectly, because it prevents large-scale deaths that would also have a negative impact on the economy.
“While NPIs lower economic activity, they can solve coordination problems associated with fighting disease transmission and mitigate the pandemic-related economic disruption,” they write. In other words, social distancing measures that save lives can also, in the end, soften the economic disruption of a pandemic.
The data here comes from a 2007 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, where a group of researchers chronicled what specific policies were put in place between September 8, 1918, and February 22, 1919, by 43 different cities. The most common NPI the JAMA researchers identified was a combination of school closures and bans on public gatherings; 34 of the 43 cities adopted this rule, for an average of four weeks.
Other cities eschewed these policies in favor of mandatory isolation and quarantine procedures: “Typically, individuals diagnosed with influenza were isolated in hospitals or makeshift facilities, while those suspected to have contact with an ill person (but who were not yet ill themselves) were quarantined in their homes with an official placard declaring that location to be under quarantine,” the JAMA authors write, detailing New York City’s approach.
Another 15 cities did both isolation/quarantines and school closures/public gathering bans.
The 2007 paper found a strong association between the number and duration of NPIs and pandemic deaths, with more and longer-lasting NPIs associated with a smaller death toll. Correia, Luck, and Verner, in their new paper, replicate this finding.
But they take it a step further. They study the impact of changes in mortality due to the 1918 pandemic on economic outcomes.
“The increase in mortality from the 1918 pandemic relative to 1917 mortality levels (416 per 100,000) implies a 23 percent fall in manufacturing employment, 1.5 percentage point reduction in manufacturing employment to population, and an 18 percent fall in output,” they conclude. In other words, a big outbreak spelled economic disaster for affected cities.
Then they combined this analysis with an analysis of the effects of NPI policies. They find that the introduction of social distancing policies is associated with more positive outcomes in terms of manufacturing employment and output. Cities with faster introductions of these policies (one standard deviation faster, to be technical) had 4 percent higher employment after the pandemic had passed; ones with longer durations had 6 percent higher employment after the disaster.
The takeaway is clear: These policies not only led to better health outcomes, they in turn led to better economic outcomes. Pandemics are very bad for the economy, and stopping them is good for the economy.
It’s important to always approach this kind of study with a degree of skepticism. The 1918 pandemic was not a planned experiment, so researchers’ ability to determine the degree to which the pandemic, or the policies adopted in response to it, affected economic outcomes is always going to be somewhat limited.
The researchers acknowledge that their biggest limitation is the non-randomness of policy adoption by cities. Presumably cities with strict responses to the pandemic were different from cities with laxer responses in ways that went beyond this one incident. Maybe the stricter cities had better public health infrastructure to begin with, for instance, which could exaggerate the estimated effect of social distancing interventions.
The authors argue that because the second and most fatal wave of the 1918 pandemic spread mostly from east to west, geographically, these kinds of dynamics weren’t at play. “Given the timing of the influenza wave, cities that were affected later appeared to have implemented NPIs sooner as they were able to learn from cities that were affected in the early stages of the pandemic,” they note.
The best explanation of differences in policies, then, is how far a city is from the East Coast of the US. They control for a big factor that might affect Western states more (the boom and bust of the agricultural industry as World War I drew to a close) and find few other observable differences between Western cities with strong policies and Eastern policies with weak ones. But the notion that these cities are comparable is a key part of the paper’s research design, and one worth digging into as the paper goes through peer review and revisions.
The message that there isn’t a trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy is reassuring. If there were such a trade-off, the debate over coronavirus response would be in the realm of pure values: How much money should we be willing to forsake to save a human life? That’s a thorny choice, and finding that we don’t actually have to make it — as this paper suggests — is comforting.
It’s worth emphasizing, though, that if we did have to make that choice, it would still be an easy decision. The lives saved would be worth more.
In another recent white paper, UChicago’s Michael Greenstone and Vishan Nigam estimate the social value of social distancing policies, relative to a baseline where we endure an untrammeled pandemic. To simulate the two scenarios, they rely on the influential Imperial College London model of the coronavirus pandemic — a paper that found that an uncontrolled spread of coronavirus would kill 2.2 million Americans.
Then they throw in an oft-used tool of cost-benefit economic analysis: the value of a statistical life (VSL). Popularized by Vanderbilt economist Kip Viscusi, VSL involves putting a dollar value on a human life by estimating the implicit value that people in a given society place on continuing to live based on their willingness to pay for services that reduce their risk of dying.
Usually, this involves a “revealed preferences” approach. A 2018 paper by Viscusi, for example, used, among other data sources, Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries to measure how much more, in practice, US workers demand to be paid to take jobs that carry a higher risk of death.
Greenstone and Nigam allow VSL to vary with age — understandably, older people are less willing to pay to reduce their odds of death than younger people — but set the average VSL for an American age 18 and over to $11.5 million.
Based on the Imperial College projection that social distancing would save about 1.76 million lives over the next six months, Greenstone and Nigam estimate that the economic value of the policy is $7.9 trillion, larger than the entire US federal budget and greater than a third of GDP. The value is about $60,000 per US household. Even if the Imperial College model is off by 60 percent and the no-social-distancing scenario is less deadly than anticipated, the aggregate benefits are still $3.6 trillion. And this is likely an underestimate that ignores other costs of a large-scale outbreak to society; it focuses solely on mortality benefits.
VSL is sometimes attacked from the left as craven, a reductio ad absurdum of economistic reasoning trampling over everything, including the value of human life itself. But coronavirus helps illustrate how VSL can work in the opposite direction. Human life is so valuable in these terms that social distancing would have to force a 33 percent drop in US GDP before you could start to plausibly argue that the cure is worse than the disease.
That social distancing likely won’t cause a reduction in GDP relative to a scenario where there’s a multimillion-person death toll, as indicated by the 1918 flu paper, makes the case for distancing policies that much stronger.
These Charts Put the Historic U.S. Job Losses in Perspective
As you can see above, the number is 10x higher than many of the worst four-week job losses on record, so historical comparisons don’t come close.
In other words, if you were using recent recessions as a potential barometer of how bad things could get for jobless claims, the numbers coming from COVID-19 crisis just blew up your model.
To get further context on the numbers above, it’s worth jumping in a time machine to revisit what happened to job numbers in previous recessions:
Finally, it’s worth noting that during the Great Depression (1929-1933), unemployment reached a historic high of 24.9%. To get to a comparable equivalent in modern times, there would need to be 41 million Americans out of work permanently.
Although the initial jobless claims are staggering and clearly without modern precedent, there is a case to be made for cautious optimism.
Many of the aforementioned recessions took months or years to culminate, with peak job losses occurring at the tail end of each recession. The current crisis, now being called “The Great Lockdown”, caused many businesses to shut doors suddenly and against their will. It also corresponded with unexpected closures of national borders and the halting of regular trade activity around the world.
When and if normal economic activity resumes, it’ll be interesting to see how much of the damage is temporary.
Another 5.2 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, the Labor Department announced Thursday.
Why it matters: With the more than 16 million jobless claims filed over the past three weeks, more jobs have now been lost in the last month than were gained since the Great Recession.
The big picture: The weekly unemployment filings report has become a must-watch for Wall Street and economists. It offers the timeliest glimpse into how efforts to contain the coronavirus outbreak are ravaging the job market.
The bottom line: In just one month, the coronavirus economic shutdown has caused a staggering 22 million Americans to lose their jobs.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a roadmap on Tuesday that will guide how he will make the decision to relax the stay-at-home policies his state implemented to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
The big picture: While there is no timeline for modifying the stay-at-home order, Newsom’s office said California would use a “gradual, science-based and data-driven framework” to determine when it would be safe to do so. Newsom indicated efforts to flatten the curve in California “have yielded positive results.”
Details: Newsom said California would use six indicators to determine when to relax social distancing measures:
Newsom’s roadmap also notes that life will be different even after stay-at-home orders are eased. For example, restaurants will likely reopen with fewer tables and face coverings will be more common in public.
What he’s saying: “While Californians have stepped up in a big way to flatten the curve and buy us time to prepare to fight the virus, at some point in the future we will need to modify our stay-at-home order,” Newsom said.
It feels like some big, terrible switch got flipped when the coronavirus upended our lives — so it’s natural to want to simply flip it back. But that is not how the return to normalcy will go.
The big picture: Even as the number of illnesses and deaths in the U.S. start to fall, and we start to think about leaving the house again, the way forward will likely be slow and uneven. This may feel like it all happened suddenly, but it won’t end that way.
What’s next: Nationally, the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. is projected to hit its peak within the next few days. But many big cities will see their own peaks significantly later — for them, the worst is yet to come.
The future will come in waves — waves of recovery, waves of more bad news, and waves of returning to some semblance of normal life.
What the post-lockdown world will look like:
And there will be more waves of infection, even in areas that have passed their peaks.
This is all but inevitable in the U.S., too, especially as travel begins to pick back up. Some places may need to shut down again, or at least tighten back up, if these new flare-ups are bad enough.
What we’re watching: We’ll still need a lot more diagnostic testing to make this process work. Public health officials need to be able to identify people who might be spreading the virus before they begin to feel sick, and then identify the people they may have infected.
The real turning point won’t come until there’s a proven, widely available treatment or, even better, a widely available vaccine.
The bottom line: “I’m not going back to Disneyland, I’m not going to take a cruise again, until we have a very aggressive testing system or we have very effective therapeutics or a vaccine,” Gottlieb said.
The United States, the organization’s largest donor, has committed to provide the WHO with $893 million during its current two-year funding period, a State Department spokesperson told The Washington Post.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the family’s giant philanthropy, is the next biggest donor to WHO after the U.S., accounting for close to 10 percent of the United Nations agency’s funding.
As The Washington Post’s Anne Gearan reported, the president said on Tuesday that the halt in U.S. funding would continue for a period of 60 to 90 days “while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role and severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.”
“We have not been treated properly,” Trump said at the Tuesday news briefing. He added, “The WHO pushed China’s misinformation about the virus.”
It remains unclear whether the United States will cut off money to the main international organization, or if Trump is setting conditions for a resumption of U.S. payments at a later date, The Post reported.
The announcement looms as a potentially devastating blow to the agency during the coronavirus pandemic, as the United States’ donations make up nearly 15 percent of all voluntary donations given worldwide.
The criticism from Gates, whose foundation has committed up to $100 million as part of the global response to the pandemic, comes as Trump has attempted to deflect blame for the administration’s failure to respond vigorously and early to the deadly novel coronavirus.
Also defending the WHO was U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who, while not naming Trump, said it was “not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus.”
“Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences,” he said.
Others, such as the American Medical Association, called Trump’s announcement to cut WHO funding “a dangerous step in the wrong direction.”
“Cutting funding to the WHO — rather than focusing on solutions — is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world,” the organization said in a statement. “The AMA is deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications, and we strongly urge the President to reconsider.”
While some of Trump’s conservative allies are focusing on the WHO as complicit in a Chinese coverup of the outbreak, others have urged the president to hold off on moving forward on suspending funding.
“If the president wants to genuinely hold the WHO accountable, counter Chinese efforts to shift blame for COVID-19, and reform the WHO to better respond to the next pandemic, he should not cut funding — at least not yet,” wrote Brett D. Schaefer, an expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation and member of the U.N.’s Committee on Contributions.
It isn’t the first time that Gates has questioned the country’s response to the pandemic. In a TED interview last month, Gates, while not mentioning Trump by name, suggested the push to relax social distancing to reopen the country was reckless.
“There really is no middle ground, and it’s very tough to say to people: ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is all that counts,’” Gates said. “It’s very irresponsible for somebody to suggest that we can have the best of both worlds.”
In a March 31 op-ed for The Post, Gates emphasized that while the U.S. lost valuable time in getting out ahead of its response, there was still a path forward for recovery through decisions made by “science, data and the experience of medical professionals.”
“There’s no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus. But the window for making important decisions hasn’t closed,” Gates wrote. “The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of covid-19.”
The CEO of Kaleida Health in Buffalo, N.Y., said hospitals will likely need a bailout due to COVID-19, according to local news station WGRZ.
Kaleida Health President and CEO Jody Lomeo highlighted parallels between hospitals and U.S. automakers during the Great Recession.
“I would think there’s gonna have to be some reimbursement on some level and we’ve seen some of that already with the [recent federal] stimulus bill. We’re gonna need support,” he told WGRZ. He added that his health system “can survive for a couple of months; after that I would be really nervous.”
While federal stimulus funds have begun flowing to hospitals nationwide, hospital CEOs are blasting HHS’ decision to distribute the first $30 billion in emergency funding based on Medicare fee-for-service revenue. HHS said April 10 it would allocate money to hospitals and providers based on their historical share of revenue from the Medicare program, rather than the burden caused by the coronavirus or number of uninsured patients treated.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said the world was entering into “uncharted territory” because it was not prepared for a pandemic like COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Gates, who has been warning about the risk of a pandemic disease for years and who has poured millions into fighting the new coronavirus outbreak, told “BBC Breakfast” on Sunday that the world should have invested more into mitigating a global health crisis.
“Well, there was a period when I and other health experts were saying that this was the greatest potential downfall the world faced,” he told the BBC in an interview on Sunday, highlighting his previous warnings against the possibility of a deadly pandemic.
“So we definitely will look back and wish we had invested more,” he said, “so that we could quickly have all the diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines. We underinvested,” he said.
The 67-year-old billionaire warned that in the period before COVID-19 became a public-health crisis, countries could have better prepared their testing capabilities and made sure hospitals were stocked with ventilators and other necessary health supplies.
“There is the period where the virus shows up in those first few months,” he said. “Were the tests prepared? Did countries think through getting their ICU and ventilator capacity up?”
He added that once the crisis is over “very few countries are going to get an A grade” for their handling of the outbreak.
“Now, here we are, we didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice,” he said. “So both in health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
Gates has become an outspoken advocate for preparing for a global health crisis like COVID-19.
Speaking to the Financial Times earlier this month, Gates said that COVID-19 was the “biggest event that people will experience in their entire lives” and world leaders and global policymakers have “paid many trillions of dollars more than we might have had to if we’d been properly ready.”
He told FT he was confident that lessons learned from this outbreak would encourage people to better prepare for next time but lamented that the cost this time around was too high.
“It shouldn’t have required a many trillions of dollars loss to get there,” he said. “The science is there. Countries will step forward.”
HENRY KOTULA 
LONDON – As the COVID-19 crisis roars on, so have debates about China’s role in it. Based on what is known, it is clear that some Chinese officials made a major error in late December and early January, when they tried to prevent disclosures of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, even silencing health-care workers who tried to sound the alarm. China’s leaders will have to live with these mistakes, even if they succeed in resolving the crisis and adopting adequate measures to prevent a future outbreak.
What is less clear is why other countries think it is in their interest to keep referring to China’s initial errors, rather than working toward solutions. For many governments, naming and shaming China appears to be a ploy to divert attention from their own lack of preparedness. Equally concerning is the growing criticism of the World Health Organization, not least by US President Donald Trump, who has attacked the organization for supposedly failing to hold the Chinese government to account. At a time when the top global priority should be to organize a comprehensive coordinated response to the dual health and economic crises unleashed by the coronavirus, this blame game is not just unhelpful but dangerous.
Globally and at the country level, we desperately need to do everything possible to accelerate the development of a safe and effective vaccine, while in the meantime stepping up collective efforts to deploy the diagnostic and therapeutic tools necessary to keep the health crisis under control. Given that there is no other global health organization with the capacity to confront the pandemic, the WHO will remain at the center of the response, whether certain political leaders like it or not.
Having dealt with the WHO to a modest degree during my time as chairman of the UK’s independent Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), I can say that it is similar to most large, bureaucratic international organizations. Like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations, it is not especially dynamic or inclined to think outside the box. But rather than sniping at these organizations from the sidelines, we should be working to improve them. In the current crisis, we should be doing everything we can to help both the WHO and the IMF to play an effective, leading role in the global response.
As I have argued before, the IMF should expand the scope of its annual Article IV assessments to include national public-health systems, given that these are critical determinants in a country’s ability to prevent or at least manage a crisis like the one we are now experiencing. I have even raised this idea with IMF officials themselves, only to be told that such reporting falls outside their remit because they lack the relevant expertise.
That answer was not good enough then, and it definitely isn’t good enough now. If the IMF lacks the expertise to assess public-health systems, it should acquire it. As the COVID-19 crisis makes abundantly clear, there is no useful distinction to be made between health and finance. The two policy domains are deeply interconnected, and should be treated as such.
In thinking about an international response to today’s health and economic emergency, the obvious analogy is to the 2008 global financial crisis. Everyone knows that crisis started with an unsustainable US housing bubble, which had been fed by foreign savings, owing to the lack of domestic savings in the United States. When the bubble finally burst, many other countries sustained more harm than the US did, just as the COVID-19 pandemic has hit some countries much harder than it hit China.
And yet, not many countries around the world sought to single out the US for presiding over a massively destructive housing bubble, even though the scars from that previous crisis are still visible. On the contrary, many welcomed the US economy’s return to sustained growth in recent years, because a strong US economy benefits the rest of the world.2
So, rather than applying a double standard and fixating on China’s undoubtedly large errors, we would do better to consider what China can teach us. Specifically, we should be focused on better understanding the technologies and diagnostic techniques that China used to keep its (apparent) death toll so low compared to other countries, and to restart parts of its economy within weeks of the height of the outbreak.
And, for our own sakes, we also should be considering what policies China could adopt to put itself back on a path toward 6% annual growth, because the Chinese economy inevitably will play a significant role in the global recovery. If China’s post-pandemic growth model makes good on its leaders’ efforts in recent years to boost domestic consumption and imports from the rest of the world, we will all be better off.