A MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR: THE GLOBAL NORTH-SOUTH FRAMEWORK FAILS TO EXPLAIN COVID-19, BUT WHY?

• Author: Alexander, Ryan M.
• Position: Editorial

Back in March of this year, when the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic had just begun to set in, I participated in a roundtable discussion at my campus's Institute for Ethics in Public Life. My job was to offer historical perspective by discussing the 1918 influenza pandemic. At the forum, I asked a question of a Chinese colleague, who had voluntarily undergone self-quarantine following her recent return to the United States from her home country. She had spent much of her talk discussing measures than she had recently witnessed being taken in China, including community-level efforts at voluntary self-quarantining and wearing masks. She made it clear that such efforts in China had occurred earlier, and with far more uniformity and vigor, than they had in the United States. I asked her whether this might have had anything to do with the more centralized and authoritarian regime governing China. Her response, to my surprise, was a resounding no. Rather, she contended, Chinese citizens were simply far more receptive to recommended public health measures that might offer positive outcomes for the population at large. She further extrapolated that since US citizens, even reasonably skeptical and worldly ones, primarily hear negative things about Chinese government and society, it stood to reason that I might assume that individual behaviors would reflect government imposition.

I walked away unconvinced. But since then, I have struggled to pinpoint exactly which factors have determined why certain countries have suffered extreme hardship during the pandemic, while others have not. The analytical framework of Global North-South studies would typically explain a phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic, if not explicitly then at least implicitly, as a function of the dynamics of the system that created the Global North-South divide to begin with. Thus, the logic would follow that countries on the losing side of that divide--that is, those in the Global South--would suffer most, due to the familiar litany of problems plaguing them: unresponsive and corrupt governments, insufficient medical resources, economies suffering high levels of inequality and poverty, and so forth. Yet the pattern has been far more erratic. At the beginning of June, five highly developed countries--the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain--which together constitute about 7.5 percent of the worlds population, had approximately two-thirds of the worlds...