Lessons to be learned from coronavirus

There is a certain irony in the fact that the global stock markets suffered their worst falls just as China, the original epicentre of coronavirus, finally seems to have it under control. Beijing is now reporting fewer new cases each day than Britain. This is an extraordinary fact, even if it is cold comfort to the West, which is now entering a new circle of the Hell that is the Covid-19 pandemic. 

To say that the Chinese have used draconian measures against their own population would be an understatement. Nearly a billion people there have been kept in quarantine, with only one person in eight allowed out to obtain food and other essentials. Harsh punishments are in force against anyone who disobeys the rules; criticism is unpatriotic. No concessions whatsoever are made to humanity. Instead, suppressing Covid-19 is being treated as a military operation to which even economic growth must be sacrificed in the short to medium term. 

No Western society would put up with the privations that the Chinese are enduring right now — except perhaps in wartime. For the Chinese Communist Party, however, this is a war — a war of political survival. Having suppressed news of the outbreak and allowed millions to travel for Chinese New Year, Xi Jinping is personally responsible for the gravity of the outbreak. Unless he is seen to triumph, his own future and even that of the regime looks bleak.

Yet this brutal Chinese policy of containment does seem to have worked. In Britain, by contrast, the Prime Minister has given up on containment and instead speaks of delaying the peak of the outbreak here until the summer to enable the NHS to cope. The idea that the needs of the Chinese health service would play any part in Xi Jinping’s calculations is laughable. It is fair to assume that doctors and nurses there are working round the clock.

Here, by contrast, anyone who thinks they might have Covid-19 is referred to NHS 111. GP surgeries are telling such patients not to cross their thresholds. This is not a reassuring system. Anyone who has tried to use the 111 service will know that it is hopelessly understaffed and relies far too much on automated messages. When people are worried about their health, they want a human being to talk to, not a robot.

So far, the numbers here have been manageable, but they are growing rapidly. Soon the urgent care centres where those who meet the criteria to be tested for Covid-19 are referred will be overwhelmed. The NHS has always relied on GPs as its first line of defence. If they are being deliberately excluded from the fight against coronavirus, the system will struggle to cope. 

The policy of “delay” means prolonging the outbreak. This is, we are assured, the scientific consensus. But it is emphatically not what China has done. In a free society, we expect our political and medical authorities to justify their decisions. Yet all that we hear from them are bromides. We, the public, are supposed to trust the Government, but the Government does not trust us not to panic if it takes us into its confidence. While Parliament is still sitting, it has a job to do in persuading ministers to give us a more convincing rationale for their policy than “we are following the science”.

Looking to the future, we must never allow our economy to become so dependent on one country again. To allow China to dominate our trade and industry to such an extent is as foolish as it was for Irish agriculture to rely on the potato in the 19th century. That is why the Huawei issue is likely to provoke the first major backbench rebellion of this Government. We don’t want to be in a position where every time China catches a cold, we get pneumonia.