What Will We Learn?

A t some point, hopefully early next year, the coronavirus will fade away from our lives. Many of us will be vaccinated, and the options for treating COVID-19 will be better. The schools will fully reopen. Americans who have been working from home will return to their offices. And in the aftermath of the crisis, with a little time and perspective, we will face an enormous question: What did we learn? And what should change because of what we learned?

Will U.S. policy toward China change because of the pandemic? At minimum, the Chinese government stifled reports for three weeks that the virus was contagious and misled the World Health Organization. If the Chinese government would lie about a matter as consequential as this, how can we trust them on arms agreements, trade treaties, or any other geopolitical matter?

If you believe that it is not a coincidence that a novel coronavirus similar to those found in bats first appeared in a Chinese city with not one but two government-run laboratories researching novel coronaviruses in bats, then the bad judgment and untrustworthiness of the Chinese government are even more consequential. The way the virus emerged suggests that someone in the Chinese government knew this was a pandemic triggered by sloppy or negligent human actions and covered it up — and left the world unprepared and unsuspecting as the virus spread far and wide.

At this point, changes to American policy toward China appear likely to be minor and incremental. Congress is increasingly critical of the Chinese government, as is the broader American public, but corporate America hasn’t seen anything to shake its fervent desire for access to the Chinese market — not concentration camps for Uyghurs, not a brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, not a catastrophic non-response in the earliest days of the pandemic. Few American firms altered their production operations in China because of the coronavirus outbreak. U.S. brands kept expanding into mainland China throughout the year.

In the credits for the recently released Mulan, the Disney Corporation thanked Chinese propaganda departments and a public-security bureau in the province of Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are being interned and persecuted. Does this look like a company that cares about the Chinese government’s behavior? Are there any signs that America’s top companies give a hoot about public anger at China?

Whether you believe the pandemic stemmed from a laboratory accident or is naturally occurring, it is clear that bats carry novel coronaviruses, and pangolins can be carriers of those kinds of viruses as well. Increased human interaction with these species means increased odds of a contagious novel coronavirus jumping from them to humans. The ongoing and often illegal trade in rare animal species represents a persistent risk factor that could create another pandemic. In 2016, 183 governments around the world agreed to ban the international commercial trade in pangolins, but there is little sign that the ban changed much. Between 2015 and 2019, 278 tons of pangolin scales were confiscated, and the annual quantity of pangolin scales seized increased by nearly 400 percent.

The illegal trade in rare animals continues in part because the customer base is intact. The Chinese government has concluded that the Wuhan seafood market was not the origin point of the virus, but years before SARS-CoV-2 came along, virologists warned that wet markets — where lots of animals are slaughtered and served in cramped, crowded, unsanitary conditions — made a near-ideal ground zero for a new pandemic. But little has changed at China’s wet markets, despite calls for them to be closed by the U.S. government and the United Nations’ biodiversity chief. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in April, “I think they should shut down those things right away.” Wet markets continue to operate all over Asia and Africa. If a severe global pandemic didn’t change people’s thinking and actions regarding these markets, it’s fair to wonder if anything ever will.

The pandemic has proven a painful lesson that our society’s ability to evaluate information — particularly through the lens of its most high-profile media institutions — is just one layer of hot garbage atop another. In late January, Business Insider assured us that “the flu is a far bigger threat to most people in the US than the Wuhan coronavirus”; the Daily Beast tut-tutted, “the virus killing U.S. kids isn’t the one dominating the deadlines”; the New York Times declared that “racist sentiment” was a concurrent outbreak; and the University of California at Berkeley’s health services center warned that “xenophobia” was a common reaction to news of the virus. In February, CNN warned: “What’s spreading faster than coronavirus in the US? Racist assaults and ignorant attacks against Asians.”

With the pandemic behind us, will it be safe to acknowledge that just maybe those warning about the virus in January and February weren’t being xenophobic? That they might have had good reasons to doubt the assurances from Beijing? That they might have had justifiable reasons to think that travelers from China were potential carriers?

Were the changes in policies and recommendations from public health experts well explained? Has any public official really grappled with how the initial declarations that masks were unnecessary or ineffective — driven by fears of a shortage of masks for hospital workers — fueled public skepticism about masks? Has anyone recognized and acknowledged that knee-jerk accusations of xenophobia recklessly downplayed a very real threat?

Then there the more-than-fair objections to how American society responded to the pandemic starting in mid March. On paper, quarantining people to minimize the spread of a contagious disease is a time-tested and wise policy. But how long is it reasonable to close businesses, deny people a way to make a living, and deny people their constitutionally protected rights to gather and assemble? When does it become unreasonable? “As long as it takes” is not an acceptable answer. It is one thing to say to local restaurants, “We need you to shift to delivery and takeout only for two weeks.” It is another to ban indoor dining for six months, as New York City has done.

As we look around the world, countries with preexisting high levels of social trust are generally doing better at handling the problems that the pandemic caused. If a country’s citizens believe that their leaders are honest, that the rules are wisely considered and deliberately enacted, that the laws are uniformly and fairly applied and enforced, and that objections are heard and fairly contemplated — then, shockingly enough, things run much more smoothly.

The United States in 2020 does not score highly on most measures of social trust. Why? Did our elected leaders at the federal, state, and local levels nurture this social trust, or did they abuse and diminish it? Did public-health experts and academics add to public understanding or create a cacophony of conflicting advice? Did members of the media clarify, explain, and illuminate, or did they spotlight the loudest and most divisive voices and turn every issue into a noisy shouting match of conflicting views and angry finger-pointing? Did social media help inform us, or did it merely empower conspiracy theorists of every stripe and let dangerously bad ideas spread faster and farther?

The coronavirus pandemic is a test, and so far we haven’t scored nearly as well as we’d like. The question is, What do we learn when things go wrong? Do we figure out a way to make them turn out right?