Government Responses To The Covid 19 Pandemic

This book examines how governments around the world responded to the health emergency created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Before vaccines became available, non-medical interventions were the main means to protect the public. Non-medical interventions were put in place by governments as public health policies. In every nation, politicians and governments faced a choice situation, and worldwide, they made different choices. Public health policies came at a price, in economic, social, and ultimately electoral costs to the political incumbents. The book discusses differences in governments’ policy efforts to mitigate the virus spread. The authors conduct in-depth analysis of country-cases from Africa, North and South America, Asia, and Europe. They also offer small-n- comparative analyses as well as report global patterns and trends of governments’ responsiveness to the medical emergency. It will appeal to all those interested in public policy, health policy and governance.

This book examines similarities and differences in 31 European governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic hit Europe in early 2020. It spread across the continent during the Spring while anxious electorates were treated to news reports about health systems under duress and frustrated attempts by public procurement officials to obtain adequate supplies of medical and protective equipment. Over the next 15–18 months considered by this book, national responses exhibited both similarities and profound variations as the different endeavours to regulate social interactions constituted a stress test for political systems across Europe.

On 12 March 2020 Manitoba confirmed its first case of COVID-19. One week later, a province-wide state of emergency was declared, ushering in a new sense of urgency and rarely used government powers to protect Manitobans from the devastating global reach of the novel coronavirus. The wide-ranging impacts of the pandemic have touched every facet of Manitoba society and provincial responsibility, including health, economic development, social services, and government operations. COVID-19 has challenged the conventional policy-making process––complicating agenda setting and policy formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation––while governments have been under pressure to make swift decisions in life-and-death matters. New programs must address urgent and shifting health and economic realities, but also anticipate future waves of COVID-19 and potentially significant repercussions for future governments. "COVID-19 in Manitoba: Public Policy Responses to the First Wave" seeks to understand how Manitoba fared during the first months of the pandemic, with twenty-seven chapters that address key aspects of the pandemic and discuss how government policy can help lay the foundation for resiliency in the midst a continuing public-health crisis. This open-access volume is an essential resource for citizens and policy-makers alike, as it identifies policy gaps and successes of Manitoba’s early COVID response and points to strategies to prepare for future waves of the pandemic.

In October 2022, the economist Emily Oster wrote a plea for a “pandemic amnesty.” After detailing various ill-conceived public health policies throughout the pandemic, Oster concluded that “The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well.” She reasoned that many admittedly poor, public health decisions were made in an information vacuum and that the salubrious thing to do going forward would be to forgive and forget. Oster was concerned about the fraying social fabric because of polarizing online discourse and urged the need to move forward. However, our anecdotal experience has shown a second common response to pandemic mishaps—going blank entirely on what occurred during the pandemic. We have observed a phenomenon of the surreal, sometimes inane, often unprecedented and unusual public health measures taken over the roughly three-year pandemic period being a “memory hole,” where the mind completely fogs over. Many times in the course of writing this book, we have messaged one another upon unearthing one public policy absurdity upon another: the City of Toronto taping off cherry blossoms, Quebec requiring unvaccinated people to be chaperoned in plexiglass carts through the essential aisles of big-box stores. We are not psychologists, but no doubt there is an evolutionary benefit to allowing a collective trauma to dissolve into the slip-stream: it is unproductive to dwell on how we got by and how our government coped in real-time. Our memories are warped, first, by the “primacy effect” our tendency to remember “firsts” exemplified by people universally naming George Washington when asked to recall former U.S. presidents. Most people have a crystal clear memory of the moment their plague year started in earnest; for us and many others; it was March 11, 2020, the day the NBA suspended games for the rest of the season.

The book provides a global perspective of local government response towards the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of a sample of countries in all continents. It examines the responses of local government, as well as the responses local government developed in articulation with other tiers of government and with civil society organizations, and explores the social, economic and policy impacts of the pandemic. The book offers an innovative contribution on the role of local government during the pandemic and discusses lessons for the future. The COVID-19 pandemic had a global impact on public health, in the well-being of citizens, in the economy, on civic life, in the provision of public services, and in the governance of cities and other human settlements, although in an uneven form across countries, cities and local communities. Cities and local governments have been acting decisively to apply the policy measures defined at national level to the specific local conditions. COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacy of the crisis response infrastructures and policies at both national and local levels in these countries as well as in many others across the world. But it also exposed much broader and deeper weaknesses that result from how societies are organized, namely the insecure life a substantial proportion of citizens have, as a result of economic and social policies followed in previous decades, which accentuated the impacts of the lockdown measures on employment, income, housing, among a myriad of other social dimensions. Besides the analysis of how governments, and local government, responded to the public health issues raised by the spread of the virus, the book deals also with the diversity of responses local governments have adopted and implemented in the countries, regions, cities and metropolitan areas. The analysis of these policy responses indicates that previously unthinkable policies can surprisingly be implemented at both national and local levels.

This book explores the reasons behind the variation in national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, it furthers the policy studies scholarship through an examination of the effects of policy styles on national responses to the pandemic. Despite governments being faced with the same threat, significant variation in national responses, frequently of contradictory nature, has been observed. Implications about responses inform a broader class of crises beyond this specific context. The authors argue that trust in government interacts with policy styles resulting in different responses and that the acute turbulence, uncertainty, and urgency of crises complicate the ability of policymakers to make sense of the problem. Finally, the book posits that unless there is high trust between society and the state, a decentralized response will likely be disastrous and concludes that while national responses to crises aim to save lives, they also serve to project political power and protect the status quo. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of public policy, public administration, political science, sociology, public health, and crisis management/disaster management studies.

Managing Federalism through Pandemic summarizes and analyses multiple policy dimensions of Canada’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy issues from the perspective of Canadian federalism. Contributors address the relative effectiveness of intergovernmental cooperation at the summit level and in policy fields including emergency management, public health, national security, Indigenous Peoples and governments, border governance, crisis communications, fiscal federalism, income security policies (CERB), supply chain resilience, and interacting energy and climate policies. Despite serious policy failures of individual governments, repeated fluctuations in the overall effectiveness of pandemic management, and growing public frustration across provinces and regions, contributors show how processes for intergovernmental cooperation adapted reasonably well to the pandemic’s unprecedented stresses, particularly at the outset. The book concludes that, despite individual policy failures, Canada’s decentralized approach to policy management often enabled regional adaptation to varied conditions, helped to contain serious policy failures, and contributed to various degrees of policy learning across governments. Managing Federalism through Pandemic reveals how the pandemic exposed structural policy weaknesses which transcend federalism but have significant implications for how governments work together (or don’t) to promote the well-being of citizens.

The COVID-19 pandemic bared the inadequacies in existing structures of public health and governance in most countries. This book provides a comparative analysis of policy approaches and planning adopted by federal governments across the globe to battle and adequately respond to the health emergency as well as the socio-economic fallouts of the pandemic. With twenty-four case studies from across the globe, the book critically analyzes responses to the public health crisis, its fiscal impact and management, as well as decision-making and collaboration between different levels of government of countries worldwide. It explores measures taken to contain the pandemic and to responsibly regulate and manage the health, socio-economic welfare, employment, and education of its people. The authors highlight the deficiencies in planning, tensions between state and local governments, politicization of the crisis, and the challenges of generating political consensus. They also examine effective approaches used to foster greater cooperation and learning for multi-level, polycentric innovation in pandemic governance. One of the first books on federalism and approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, this volume is an indispensable reference for scholars and researchers of comparative federalism, comparative politics, development studies, political science, public policy and governance, health and wellbeing, and political sociology.