Analysis: How do world leaders’ responses to coronavirus stack up?

A week ago, US President Donald Trump warned of a “very, very painful two weeks”, forecasting up to 240,000 deaths even if social distancing guidelines were maintained. Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, briefed reporters with even more frightening numbers: up to 2.2 million deaths “without mitigation”. That would work out to more than 1 in every 200 Americans – a scenario in which every US citizen would know someone killed by the coronavirus.

The current death toll in the US is over 18,000. How did it get so bad? Well, for national emergencies, a nation’s leadership must be held accountable. And charting Trump’s ever-changing stance on the threat posed by the virus is a fascinating exercise…

30 January: “We think we have it very well under control. ” (The same day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be “a public health emergency of international concern”, with almost 8,000 cases globally.)

2 February: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” (The number of confirmed cases had doubled in the last three days.)

10, 14 February: “You know, in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. When it gets warm, historically, that has been able to kill the virus.” (The coronavirus death toll doubled between 29-31 March and now, in April, is showing no signs of slowing.)

19 February: “I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.” (At this point, there were 15 confirmed cases. This would rise to 68 by the end of the month, including one death.)

27-28 February: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear and you’ll be fine.”

2-3 March: “They’re gonna have the vaccines relatively soon. Not only the vaccines, but the therapies. Therapies is sort of another word for cure.” (There is very little chance of a vaccine being ready and regulatorily approved for public consumption by the end of the year.)

4, 6 March: “We’re talking about very small numbers in the United States. Our numbers are lower than just about anybody’s.” (17 had died in the US, compared to none in many countries.)

10 March: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

11 March: “We are responding with great speed and professionalism.” (Between 8-11 March, 77 Americans were tested for coronavirus – not even two people per state. The US fiscal stimulus, though historic in its scope, would not be passed for another two and a half weeks.)

13 March (when asked about the lack of testing): “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

17 March: “This is a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. All you had to do is look at other countries.” (Four days before the WHO declared it a pandemic on 11 March, Trump said: “I’m not concerned at all.”)

Unquestionably, Trump’s vacillations – and the lack of emergency response that accompanied them – will cost many thousands of lives, not to mention the economic damage that will ensue from the lockdown, whose length is proportional to its lateness. A man who, days ago, was saying he could get the economy resuscitated by Easter Sunday is now telling reporters, “We lose more here potentially than you lose in world wars.” (The US suffered 116,000 deaths in the First World War.)

The estimate of 240,000 deaths will be the outcome if lockdown and social distancing guidelines are rigorously adhered to; it is also based on data from the worst-affected areas (New York and New Jersey) and projections based on what has happened in Italy.

It is worth comparing the US leadership to that of other major countries, to see if any leaders managed the situation better, and if so, how and why. (China will be exempted for now – the true picture there is currently murky.) Firstly, comparing the response in countries led by populist Trump-aligned demagogues yields a surprising degree of differentiation.

Brazil

President Jair Bolsonaro, arguably the major national leader most similar to Trump, has led an approach so blasé and ill-informed that even Facebook and Twitter removed a video of him speaking to street vendors because it violated their misinformation standards. He has been merrily instantiating his own “Brazil can’t stop” campaign, shaking hands while touring Brasilia nine days ago and contradicting the country’s health minister by declaring that the virus “will soon pass”.

“I advocate that you work, that everybody works,” he told one street vendor. In this sense, he has gone a step further than Trump, who has tacitly acknowledged the wrong-headedness of his initial approach by pretending he’d known all along how serious the virus was.

Currently, only 1,000 Brazilians have died from coronavirus (compared to the US’s 18,000). But the numbers are rising steeply, and with exhausted healthcare systems, crowded urban conditions and a transparent lack of leadership roundly condemned even by social media networks noted in recent years for their tolerance of misinformation, we can predict dire straits for Brazil by the summer.

Leadership verdict: Dangerous and irresponsible.

India

Despite mispronouncing his name in a recent speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has great respect for Trump. Yet his approach to the virus has been starkly different. By mid-March, India had already conducted over 5,000 tests, and screened over a million passengers at airports. In late March, Modi placed India under the largest lockdown of its kind, giving 1.3 billion Indians only four hours’ notice. State borders have now been closed, despite 100,000 people gathering at border points in Delhi alone just to get back to their rural homes for the lockdown, no longer able to pay rent in the city. (One worker died after trying to walk the 270km journey to his home village.) To help redress the misery, state governments will set up relief shelters for migrant workers; there are 500 in Delhi alone, with free food for 400,000 people.

Modi’s alacrity was admirable, but was reminiscent of the short-notice, top-down diktat that characterised his demonetisation initiative, regarded internationally as a failure that cost around 1.5 million jobs in the short-term (and 5 million jobs in the two years following). Modi’s response to the coronavirus exemplifies his propensity for keeping a bigger picture in mind whatever the human cost – a flexing of state muscle without a holistic consideration of the citizens the state is paid to protect. As in all countries, the poor will be hardest hit by these measures. But India’s corpus of poor people dwarfs that of every nation other than China.

So far, only around 100,000 people have been tested, 0.007% of the populace, with only high-risk people eligible for testing. “We need focused testing,” one senior virologist told BBC News. “We cannot do a China or Korea because we simply don't have the capacity.” Balram Bhargava, director of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), says that “there is no evidence of community outbreak” in India, and that mass testing would “create more fear, more paranoia and more hype”.

With only 1.3% of its GDP spent on healthcare, India will likely suffer greatly from coronavirus, especially given its colossal population and the fact that over 1 in 6 urban Indians live in cramped slum housing conditions. But in any case, Modi’s government can’t be accused of inaction.

Leadership verdict: Proactive but impetuous. A sincere response, but – like many of Modi’s measures – will do more harm than good for the country’s most vulnerable people. It is unlikely Modi’s strong-handed leadership can compensate for the country’s lack of healthcare capacity.

The UK

When news emerged that UK prime minister Boris Johnson had contracted COVID-19, it felt like a grim sort of karma: in a press conference earlier in March, flanked by two visibly uncomfortable chief scientific advisers, he announced to the nation, “I’m shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where there were a few coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody. I continue to shake hands, and I think it’s very important”.

Johnson’s blithe embracing of the virus may have been responsible for several high-profile government figures coming down with COVID-19, including health secretary Matt Hancock and chief medical officer Chris Whitty. Yet more worrying than the prime minister’s approach is that of his principal behind-the-scenes strategist Dominic Cummings (who, unsurprisingly, has also developed coronavirus symptoms).

In the face of prevailing global opinion, Cummings encouraged the UK government to follow the controversial path of “herd immunity”: allowing a certain amount of people to contract the virus on the assumption that they would develop immunity and thus not pass the virus on to others. Interestingly, this theory had been in development for many years – a radical alternative to virus suppression that could have been an example of startling, groundbreaking thought-leadership. However, it had been modelled for illnesses like influenza – not for new and unpredictable viruses.

The government realised, belatedly, that herd immunity to coronavirus was unworkable without a huge number of deaths, and began pretending it had never been official policy – though there is BBC footage of Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, saying that building up herd immunity was one of “the key things we need to do”.

(An interesting side-note: Sweden has, to date, persisted with a herd immunity strategy. When compared to its Nordic neighbours, the picture isn’t pretty: Sweden’s coronavirus death toll is currently, per capita, four times higher than Norway’s and eight times higher than Finland’s.)

The UK's weakest leadership came from Johnson himself, who took weeks to give precise advice on what to do and not do, and spent a week in late February at his country retreat when much of the country was experiencing severe flooding and early signs of a viral crisis. Until late March, Johnson’s preferred method of addressing the public was by leaking information to selected journalists rather than making direct government statements or broadcasts. Eventually, a lockdown came into place on 23 March. Meanwhile, owners of small and medium-sized businesses suffered from the leadership’s vagueness: Johnson had advised people not to go to certain places without ordering those places to shut or offering any rapid reimbursement, leaving many days of dwindling custom that killed off no small number of small businesses.

It was not all doom and gloom in the UK: chancellor Rishi Sunak won widespread praise for the clarity and scope of his budget, which, on 17 March, unveiled a £350 billion rescue package for UK businesses, with assurances of more money to come if this was not enough. However, as of 7 April, 2,022 loans in total have been made to small and medium-sized companies under the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme, out of 300,000 applications made so far. That's a success rate of 0.65% in two and a half weeks. We can only hope that this accelerates significantly.

Leadership verdict: Maverick but maladroit. A delayed, initially dangerous response that has meant that the UK’s death toll is, at the time of writing, rising even more steeply than the US’s. The worst economic effects of the virus in the UK have been mitigated by an unprecedentedly large fiscal stimulus, based on levels of borrowing the government was previously claiming were impossible.

Moving away from the populist demagogue style of government, let’s look at how other nations have reacted.

Italy

Italy was the first-hit European country, and so, it might be said, has more reason to report staggeringly high death rates. Some have theorised that Italy’s large elderly population and the high level of interaction between young and old family members spread the virus faster; in any case, 19,000 Italians have died. This equates to 1 in 3,000 Italians.

Italy identified its first two coronavirus cases on 29 January. On 30 January, the country’s prime minister Giuseppe Conte not only declared a state of emergency but blocked all flights from China. Three weeks later, a 6pm curfew was placed on bars and restaurants in Milan; another three weeks later, on 9 March, Italy ordered all shops, bars and restaurants to close. During this six-week period, and even before late January, the virus would have spread silently, showing no symptoms among its carriers while being transmitted to vulnerable people all over the country, particularly in the north.

It’s hard to see how Italy, in a situation sui generis for the whole of Europe, could reasonably be expected to have acted much differently. It carried out a large number of tests, especially in Lombardy, yielding higher case numbers than countries that were testing less (and making the country seem especially hard-hit). Naturally, Italy made mistakes that were repeated by politicians in other countries: politicians on the left and right of the spectrum played down the virus’s seriousness, with the mayor of Milan launching a “Milan doesn’t stop” (echoed by Bolsonaro’s “Brazil Doesn’t Stop” weeks later). But national lockdown must be a last resort, and it was resorted to after it became clear that the public was ignoring the government’s advice to socially distance and avoid unnecessary travel.

Leadership verdict: For a while, Italy was synonymous with coronavirus in Europe. Yet despite some missteps and underestimation, the country’s government acquitted itself remarkably well, its prime minister recognising the severity of the situation early on and its healthcare system mobilising very impressively. It may well be that Italy comes out of the crisis relatively well – though the country is beginning to grow restless under the grip of lockdown. Its difficult road is far from over.

Spain

Comparing Spain and Italy is interesting: both have coalition governments (right-wing in Italy, left-wing in Spain) and soaring death tolls ahead of the “coronavirus curve” elsewhere.

The Spanish lockdown, which began on 14 March (five days after Italy’s), is especially strict: all forms of outdoor exercise have been outlawed on penalty of fine or arrest. It has cost a million jobs. And yet, despite the warning signs from Italy, Spain’s leadership was initially fairly relaxed. Less than two months ago, Dr Fernando Simón, head of medical emergencies in Madrid, announced: “Spain will have only a handful of cases.” Now over 16,000 have died in Spain, with the projected death toll currently arcing higher than Italy’s.

A mild spring induced much outdoor sociability in Spanish cities. Well into March, sports events, political conferences and a 120,000-strong International Women’s Day march continued in Spain, in the same way that the Cheltenham Festival in the UK attracted over a quarter of a million people from 10-13 March. Prime minister Pedro Sánchez, whose wife has now been diagnosed with COVID-19, was slow to implement the government’s emergency powers, and has had to compensate for its laggardly response with the severity of its lockdown.

As the scale of the crisis became mortally clear, it also became clear how little capacity Spain had in terms of ventilators, tests and healthcare staff. It still has more hospital beds per capita than the UK, the US or New Zealand – but there’s no doubt these will soon be overwhelmed. One test kit provided to Spain by Chinese tech company Bioeasy ended up having an accuracy rate of less than 30%.

The Spanish government’s financial intervention, however, is truly enormous: a €200bn financial rescue package. This is eight times more than what Italy has promised its people, despite Spain having fewer people. Sánchez has announced a “mortgage and utility holiday”, and there are provisions to encourage state-sponsored furloughs rather than lay-offs. There is also a €600m fund for vulnerable people and those dependent on social services.

Leadership verdict: Perhaps the leadership in Spain and Italy was reluctant to appear too heavy-handed, given the painful history of fascism in both countries. In any case, the Spanish government has an enormous crisis on its hands. Nonetheless, the extent of the government’s financial intervention could have far-reaching consequences for the country – at 20% of the country’s GDP, it is a package of unprecedented scale.

Germany

Of all the major European countries, Germany has acquitted itself remarkably well. Along with Italy, Germany has the highest percentage of citizens aged 65+ in Europe – and yet its recorded coronavirus mortality rate is 1.6%, compared to 3% in the US, 10% in the UK and 12% in Italy. The obvious reason for this statistic is the country’s rapid, comprehensive testing programme: Germany has capacity for half a million tests per week. (For comparison, the UK testing numbers are in the low five-figures, hence the high-seeming mortality rate.)

This testing programme reflects the cautiousness of the German state, which stands in stark contrast to the premature triumphalism of so many other world leaders: at a time when many leaders have been offering false hope, Lothar Wieler, the president of Germany’s public health body, has said he does not predict a significant difference between Italy’s and Germany’s mortality rate in a few months’ time. Nonetheless, Germany, despite having a larger population than Italy or Spain, has experienced fewer than 3,000 deaths.

Certainly, German hospitals have not been as overwhelmed as Italian, British and American hospitals. Partly because the country has not undergone so many years of underfunding of public services, and partly because of a fruitful symbiosis between public and private sectors, it is better medically equipped, and has more hospital beds per capita, than any other major European country. Its private healthcare and biotech institutions (most notably TIB Molbiol in Berlin) were primed to spring to action to work with the public sector (most notably the Charité university hospital, also in Berlin) – something that didn’t happen in the UK, for example, until late March. Moreover, Germany began contract tracing as soon as the first cases were reported. It helps that its central public health body, the Robert Koch Institute, is specifically geared towards “improving the efficiency of infection protection by advising the authorities on possible measures and supplementing infectious disease surveillance by monitoring selected pathogens that have high public health relevance”. It is a goal that now seems prescient.

Germany announced its lockdown on 16 March – a week after Italy and a week before the UK. Germany has gone further in decreeing that all shops must not open on Sundays. Its traditionally strong Länder (state) leaders, who are in charge of the healthcare and education policy in their respective states, have been handling the matter in a fairly bespoke yet cooperative manner, while the country’s healthcare professionals have been administering Europe-leading tests: by the end of February, the WHO had shipped 1.4 million of these tests to countries in need. It was almost mid-February by the time the UK even began implementing its own test; the US didn’t follow suit until a month later.

The German government has long prided itself on its “black zero” policy of a balanced, no-net-borrowing budget. This has had to change rapidly and radically. The country’s parliament has approved a supplementary €156 billion budget for 2020, including €50 billion for small businesses and the self-employed. Separately, there is a €500 billion bailout fund for companies with over 250 employees; remarkably, one condition is that the government can take equity in companies that avail of the fund. Residential tenants are now immune to eviction, and on top of all this, there will be a €10 billion scheme to compensate furloughed workers. Overall, this works out to €666 billion in commitments. It’s generous, and there may be more.

Leadership verdict: Despite some early criticisms of tardiness, Germany stepped up with firm leadership, public-private innovation and coordinated yet localised strategy. As well as taking leadership on a European level through the EU, and disseminating German-developed tests via the WHO, the country has broken its chief budget rule to institute an enormous fiscal stimulus that will safeguard the populace from the worst effects of the virus.

Straying further afield than Europe, it’s worth looking at how three countries close to China handled the virus – and how in each one, successful containment and tracing measures went hand-in-hand with state surveillance and relatively compliant populaces, resulting in remarkably low mortality rates.

Hong Kong

Certainly, pliancy does not immediately spring to mind when thinking of Hong Kong: months of pro-democracy protests, followed by their suppression, rocked the country in 2019. And yet the country, despite being Chinese territory, has handled the virus remarkably well, with four deaths to date in a population of 7.5 million.

Nonetheless, it may serve as a cautionary tale. After leader Carrie Lam’s strong handling of the nascent crisis in February, with virus mapping, social distancing, masks and widespread working from home, Hong Kong relaxed its approach in early March – at which point the number of confirmed cases began to double, many imported from overseas travelers. The city has renewed its lockdown, more severely than before, with non-residents barred from entering. So far, this has been fairly effective thanks to firm government enforcement bolstered by contact tracing. However, there is no getting away from the dependency of this effectiveness on the state harboring reams of live data on the activities of its people.

Financially, Hong Kong has been hit hard: the 2019 turmoil and the ongoing US-China trade war has not helped the city, and as Hong Kong businesses have faced a raft of non-payments and cancelled orders from the US and Europe, a liquidity problem has set in for much of the economy.

Banks have approved over $7.4 billion worth of emergency loans or repayment postponements for small and medium-sized businesses, while the central bank announced it would halve the minimum capital reserves commercial banks are required to hold. Yet Lam’s government’s $3.9 billion bailout fund for domestic companies and cash handouts of $1,300 for every adult in Hong Kong are far from enough. Low death rates have certainly not saved the city from the virus’s considerable and lingering aftershocks. Its millions of precarious renters have not been offered any legislative security from eviction – only government appeals for landlords to “take on more social responsibilities”.

Leadership verdict: Hong Kong has been relatively successful so far in suppressing two waves of the virus. But this has not been matched by equal vigor in keeping the economy strong and saving citizens from financial ruin.

Singapore

It was clear fairly early that Singapore’s efficient, effective, technocratic response to the virus was having heartening results. To date, only seven people have died from the two waves of coronavirus that have hit the country; as in Hong Kong, the second wave was brought on by travellers returning to Singapore.

It probably helped that Singapore experienced the SARS virus first-hand in 2003, from which it learned valuable lessons. The country closed its borders soon after the disease took off in China, and methodically began to test its population of 5.7 million as well as instituting rigorous contact tracing, as explored in a BBC article that went viral last month. By 20 March, Singapore had conducted nearly 7,000 tests per million citizens. Germany, the poster child of coronavirus testing in Europe, had conducted just over 2,000 per million citizens by then. Singapore mobilised remarkably quickly even by Asian standards: according to Dale Fisher, professor of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore, “By the time we had one of our cases, we were able to do tests and within a week, tests were available in all major hospitals.”

It helps that prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, son of the late, revered former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, is a well-respected figure. His leadership goes hand in hand with a culture of obedience and respect for government rules and guidelines. However, as in Hong Kong, public safety from the virus seems to have come at least partly at the cost of data privacy. Surveillance technology and police networks were key in containing the virus, and the Singaporean government recently rolled out its TraceTogether app, which records the distance between users as well as how much time they spend together. It should be noted that users voluntarily give up this data, which goes to the health ministry and is deleted after three weeks – but it could set an unhealthy precedent abused by future governments.

Lee hinted a couple of weeks ago that a snap election in Singapore could still go ahead soon, with any logistical difficulties being “solvable problems”. Public health crises tend to result in high approval ratings for incumbent governments, even when governments have been handling the situation badly. A snap election would likely end happily for Lee’s ruling People’s Action Party.

Public goodwill has no doubt been bolstered by Singapore’s $33.4 billion fiscal stimulus package in March, following its $4.6 billion package in February – the equivalent of $6,667 per citizen. Nonetheless, as in Hong Kong, renters have been given no legislative security against eviction. The stern words of the government (“Landlords found to have irresponsibly evicted their residents may face restrictions and even be barred from renting out their flats to foreign work pass holders in future,” said the ministries of Manpower, Education and National Development – the government’s strictest declamation on the matter so far) won’t keep a roof over anyone’s head.

Leadership verdict: The city-state’s efficiency comprises three aspects: decisive leadership, savvy tech use and a cooperative, compliant population. Having proved to be a model of contact tracing and virus suppression, Singapore is poised to come out of this crisis well, especially after its generous fiscal stimulus package. But spare a thought for the evicted renters, many of whom were already existing on the edge and have now fallen off.

South Korea

Much has been written about South Korea’s phenomenal testing programme: with test numbers on a par with Singapore, South Korea rolled out innovative tests that release results within six hours. It implemented this programme quickly and on a mass scale, so that by the end of February over 46,000 South Koreans had undergone affordable, often free, tests. By this point, the US, which also recorded its first coronavirus patient on 20 January, had only tested 426 Americans.

But something that has received less press attention is the nature of South Korean leadership in this case, which might be said to be radically decentralised: a leadership style in which a population shouldered collective responsibility, mobilised itself and endogenously took control of virus containment. Tens of thousands of businesses elected to shut themselves down and apply for government grants before it was mandated. Churches began delivering sermons online. The country’s strong social glue stood it in good stead at a time when collective sacrifice was sorely needed.

Not that this didn’t need active, often invasive leadership from above, as well as a very trusting populace. Governments used CCTV footage, GPS tracking, phone data and card payment records to track patients’ (or potential patients’) movements and catch quarantine-flouters. The authorities also encouraged companies to develop apps such as Corona 100m, which alerted users when they breached the 100-metre radius of a coronavirus patient. That much of this data is anonymised does not change the fact that such potentially invasive apps are more viable for mass take-up in Asian countries, where trust in governments is higher than in Europe or the Americas. This trust is embedded in the unwritten social contract between citizen and state in South Korea.

President Moon Jae-in’s decision to not immediately impose a travel ban on China – he has historically been emollient with the superpower, South Korea’s largest trading partner – has come in for criticism. “China’s difficulties are our difficulties,” he intoned on 20 February, with unintentional irony: South Korea’s coronavirus case numbers were doubling as he spoke. To date, 1.5 million South Koreans, generally resentful of Beijing’s overweening power in the region, have signed a petition demanding Moon’s impeachment. Despite this, his approval ratings are the highest he’s had in almost 18 months. His prospects of winning April’s leadership elections have had a handy boost.

As elsewhere in Asia, South Korea has been hit financially by the sheer global scale of the virus: in March, foreign investors sold nearly $10 billion worth of Korean shares – the biggest sell-off for the country since records began over 20 years ago. South Korea announced a $9.8 billion package on 3 March for employee retention, retraining and childcare, and will likely announce another stimulus soon. (This is all on top of a $4.8 billion stimulus package approved last August to pick the economy up from the doldrums.) Nonetheless, widespread loans to businesses or paycheques to individuals have not been policies, unlike in many other countries around the world. As in Singapore and Hong Kong, many hapless individuals and families have already faced, and will continue to face, eviction.

Leadership verdict: South Korea has dealt with coronavirus admirably, and in many ways has been a model for many countries around the world – though many other democratic populaces would baulk at the amount of data surrendered to the state in South Korea, even for emergencies. President Moon may do better than expected in the upcoming elections, but whoever wins, the struggle to rejuvenate the economy is just beginning.

Finishing all these examples on a positive, it’s worth looking at a small, non-Asian country that has handled the coronacrisis remarkably well: Australia’s friendly neighbour.

New Zealand

Jacinda Ardern has been widely regarded as a model of progressive leadership since she took the reins in New Zealand two and a half years ago, with her Labour Party the majority partner in a surprising coalition with the nationalist, populist New Zealand First party. She has handled major crises such as volcanoes and terrorist attacks with a firmness that has not precluded grace or empathy, and has won plaudits for emphasising unity in an age of division – all while presiding over an era of wage growth that has brought public- and private-sector wages to their highest in over a decade. (At the same time, unemployment in New Zealand, before the virus at least, was at its lowest since 2008.)

She also took a firm stance on instituting a lockdown before the virus could run rife through the small antipodean nation. This lockdown began on 26 March, less than a month after the country recorded its first case. For comparison, the UK and Germany began their lockdowns around seven weeks after recording their first respective coronavirus cases.

It’s fair to say that Ardern had time on her side. Perhaps understandably, it took a while for most European countries just to believe what they were seeing in Italy; they had to act rapidly and unprecedentedly. By the time the virus arrived in New Zealand, its power was undeniable – one would have to have been truly delusional, by late February, to not realise the seriousness of the necessary measures. But in any case, the success of Ardern’s alacrity in New Zealand speaks for itself: to date, in a country with a population of nearly five million, two people have died from coronavirus. Once it became clear that “flattening the curve” wouldn’t prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, squashing the curve was the only viable option.

Financially, the country’s fiscal stimulus of $7.31 billion – which, by per-capita standards among developed nations globally, is relatively low – is far more generous than Australia’s. It is targeted at employee retention and welfare benefit boosts, though critics argue that the modest boost to welfare payments was much-needed independently of the coronavirus. Renters have been offered some security: evictions for unpaid rent are illegal for up to two months. Either this will need extending, or paycheques will need to start being mailed through every door in the land. One of Ardern’s many economic achievements is that she has managed to bring down national debt. As in every other major country, this will have to be reversed big-time.

Leadership verdict: Ardern has continued her exemplary leadership in demeanour and decisiveness. She read the writing on the wall and rather than trying to scrub it off, she recognised that New Zealand would not be immune. But the small nation has a very difficult period ahead, especially since 7.5% of New Zealand’s workforce are in the now-moribund tourism sector, which accounts for much of the country’s GDP. If Ardern is true to form, misery will be minimised; but to an unfortunate extent it is inevitable.

Ultimately, the virus’s unprecedented shock to the global system means no one – not the best-testing nations, not the fastest-mobilising populations, not the countries with the lowest coronavirus death tolls – is immune to the financial ramifications. In many ways, at a time when the relationship between states, leaders and individuals has been thrown into sharper relief than it has been for many decades, the true test begins now.

Arjun Sajip