How to deal with the pandemic’s ‘shadow variant’

The COVID-19 pandemic is by far the most devastating outbreak in recent history, with ramifications that reach far beyond global public health. It has left economies crumbling, crippled international trade, emaciated multilateral cooperation, diminished aid flows, and drastically increased levels of inequality within and among nations.
Furthermore, the pandemic has reframed and reoriented domestic politics, crowding out other priorities as governments and politicians were increasingly evaluated on how well they could guide their countries through the health crisis and the many others spawned in its wake.
Any failures, perceived or otherwise, now threaten seemingly entrenched political elites and deeply embedded sociopolitical systems, not only across the Arab world but even in supposedly stable democracies the world over.
In the quest to decisively put an end to the pandemic, almost all governments have struggled to map out sustainable paths to recovery, as well as feasible ones. In the Global South, for instance, calls for even greater debt relief provisions go unanswered, forcing governments to ratchet up public spending despite severely constrained budgets, all to sustain interventions and head off catastrophe.
Such a frustrating development is almost a natural consequence of severely weakened multilateral institutions that are still tasked with shoring up global cooperation in an attempt to counter shared threats such as COVID-19.
Instead of this happening, medical nationalism and insularity continue to impede effective collective responses, a situation not helped by intensifying global competition between the US and China and their competing visions for a multilateral order in disarray.
As a result, no credible attempts have been made to ramp up equitable vaccine distribution and access, despite the fact that global public health is not secured by hoarding vaccines but by taking care of the world’s poorer, more vulnerable states.
Unsurprisingly, and tragically, the pandemic has also become a useful tool for accelerating illiberalism, under the guise of shoring up critical public health interventions at the domestic level. Beleaguered officials continuously sideline the rule of law to preempt unrest from a rightly aggrieved public or, worse, target a political opposition poised for a major comeback via antigovernment populist messaging mostly decrying ineffectual pandemic responses.
Regardless, more draconian laws and blanket restrictions on essential liberties will not revive stalled economies or miraculously restore the millions of jobs wiped out by the pandemic, nor will they reverse the diminishing prospects that are shackling the Arab region’s youth and women. If anything, they only make the worst possible outcomes even more likely now.
The “symptoms” above are but a few of the many vulnerabilities exposed by COVID-19. It seems as though, in the shadow of the numerous iterations of the coronavirus, a much more dangerous and insidious strain is affecting societies, politics and economies all over the world, triggered by knee-jerk interventions designed to contain the spread.

The key to sustainable, inclusive recoveries is not in piecemeal solutions that are designed to deal with only the most pressing issues as they emerge.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

This “shadow variant” has no fancy Greek name nor does it present itself as a public health nightmare like its other variants in the past, those we are struggling with today and those yet to come. It is a byproduct of the vulnerabilities exposed by COVID-19, metastasizing across entrenched sociopolitical structures, leading to renewed scrutiny of them by enraged populations via surging protest movements and unprecedented levels of civil disobedience and resistance.
For the Middle East in particular, palpable frustrations with failed responses to the pandemic encourage major reconsiderations of lopsided political structures, and the ways in which perversely unequal economic systems continue to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Lebanon and many of the region’s conflict hot spots and other fragile states remain the clearest examples of this phenomenon. Much like in other countries across the Arab region, the pandemic and its related woes compound existing fragilities that make the aforementioned “shadow variant” even more potent.
Setting aside what is likely to be its incalculable human toll, the impact of this less-discussed variant can be felt most on the socioeconomic front, as jobs collapse across all sectors and fail to recover quickly at levels high enough to re-absorb the unemployed and cater to new entrants to the labor market.
As the economy struggles, liquidity also dries up, a situation that is not helped by declining remittances, a byproduct of pandemic-related economic woes unique to the developed world. Meanwhile, hesitancy shrivels tourism.
The result is record levels of poverty exacerbated by failures of governance that leave an already unstable Arab region more exposed to conflict and intractable political malaise, diminishing the future prospects of the region’s most vulnerable people.
Beyond the glaring inadequacies in public health policy and infrastructure, most Arab countries still lack the institutional depth and capacity to effectively deal with the pandemic and also ensure its virulent legacy does not permanently hobble much-needed recoveries. It simply will not be enough to just inoculate populations and strongly urge a return of the familiar in some strange “new normal” without undoing the damage done by COVID-19 to our politics, societies and economies.
Granted, expecting policymakers and governments to set aside resources to deal with this nebulous threat is a very tall order. However, the key to sustainable, inclusive recoveries is not in piecemeal solutions that are designed to deal with only the most pressing issues as they emerge. Doing so risks governments in the Arab world simply reacting to new crises, which typically limits policy options and constantly shifts priorities, further delaying meaningful interventions that are critical to mounting a lasting recovery.
Most experts agree that effective responses require visionary political leadership, national unity and adequate, timely resources. This trifecta has helped the Gulf states navigate through this pandemic, thanks to fairly effective intervention protocols and highly responsive governments.
Unfortunately, even the best-laid plans or exemplary pandemic protocols are still at risk of falling prey to the vulnerabilities in neighboring Arab and non-Arab states that are still grappling with the fundamentals and low rates of vaccinations.
After all, the longer it takes to limit the spread of the virus, the more likely it is for new variants to crop up, especially highly transmissible strains, perhaps resistant to vaccines, that could emerge as the sub-region lifts travel restrictions to reinvigorate battered tourism and transportation sectors.
Should infections flare up, it would be even more challenging to re-institute common-sense restrictions since most of the region’s populations have also cognitively tuned out, ceasing to take even the most basic precautions such as wearing masks in public.
Given such circumstances, measures such as flight bans, closing borders, curfews and shutting down entire economies as precautions will simply do more harm than good. The last thing any government would want is for well-intentioned interventions to become incubators for public unrest and antipathy at a time when greater cohesion and a sense of shared responsibility are needed.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is a non-resident senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Institute at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is also senior adviser at the international economic consultancy Maxwell Stamp and at the geopolitical risk advisory firm Oxford Analytica, a member of the Strategic Advisory Solutions International Group in Washington D.C. and a former adviser to the board of the World Bank Group.
Twitter: @HafedAlGhwell