Abstract - The politics behind Covid-19

Résumé de l’étude “The politics behind Covid-19” d’Alexis PELLIER à retrouver sous peu dans l’onglet “Nos Publications” - “Notes”.

Crises have at least one bright side by revealing the strengths and the flaws, bringing out the best and the worst of the societies going through them. In this regard, several countries, such as France, have to draw a lesson from their failure to better prevent this health crisis despite the considerable amount of resources they own and the toolkit at their disposal. Although portrayed as a technical issue, countries’ response to Covid-19 is first of all political and depends mainly on historical and social factors, their society’s social performance.

In this report, the author proposes a biosocial approach to understand France’s setbacks in handling the health crisis while other countries such as Germany, Singapore and the state of Kerala (India) have brilliantly succeeded. Their time management and preparedness, the efficiency of their social organization, and the use of data were essential to their success. Therefore, Alexis PELLIER makes a comparison of Germany and France’s decision-making traditions, highlighting the efficiency of a decentralized approach versus a highly centralized one that hinders local initiative and mobilization.

In a second phase, the author explores France’s healthcare system to shed light on its assets, as one of the most performant health system in the world, but also its weaknesses as a poorly coordinated hospital-centric system which has suffered from strategic mistakes such as the non-use of the vast amount of health data available and the country’s limited testing capacity. At this point, it becomes evident that France’s difficult situation is due to complex decision-making, preparedness and coordination rather than a lack of funding.

Finally, Alexis presents the success of Kerala, a state in Southern India, which has proved to be at the forefront of the outbreak response. Kerala has been remarkable in managing and coordinating infrastructure and human resources by relying on a highly educated, organized and mobilized society. More than huge figures and indices, the Indian state’s example is a role model in achieving more with less, making economic analysis of development insufficient in explaining the strengths and the weaknesses of any given society. In countries’ response to Covid-19, human and long-term factors such as good governance, preparedness, education, a mobilized and empowered civil society among others have contributed more to their success.