Abstract
This special issue is the second of a two-part series on pandemics for the Journal of Developing Societies. The first issue looked at the immediate aftermath of the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. This issue places pandemic concerns within a longer timeframe. The first two articles by Ronn Pineo and David Carey Jr., seek to place the battles with pandemics in historical context. Pineo reviews the history of influenza and Carey analyzes international responses, in collaboration with the local public health efforts, to eradicate yellow fever in early twentieth century Ecuador and Guatemala. The last two articles in this edition, by Sity Daud on Malaysia, and by Billy Agwanda, Gershon Dagba, Prince Opoku, Mark Opoku Amankwa and Israel Nyaburi Nyadera on Sub-Saharan Africa, assess the longer-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for developing societies.
Essays in this Issue
In “Four Flu Pandemics: Lessons that Need to Be Learned,” Ronn Pineo explores the history of influenza, focusing on the four major flu pandemics in the last century and a half, the outbreaks starting in 1889, 1918, 1957, and in 1968. The essay looks closely at flu etiology and the historical puzzles over which flu subtype was responsible for each major outbreak. Some mysteries regarding pandemic influenza remain, with core questions stubbornly refusing to yield answers. This essay seeks to explore the history of the flu in the hope that we can take away some lessons learned as we try to get ready for potential future flu pandemics.
In “Yellow Fever’s Historical Lessons for COVID-19: International Interventions and Disease Control in Early Twentieth-Century Ecuador and Guatemala,” David Carey Jr., considers the parallels between two earlier epidemics in Latin America and the COVID-19 pandemic of today. Carey explores the critical role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in yellow fever eradication, looking especially at how local sensibilities shaped the nature of the programs. Port cities especially needed to avoid yellow fever epidemics if they were going to remain open to international trade. But city health officials resented the sometimes high-handed approach of arrogant foreign experts. Local officials did not like being treated like backward rubes. Carey presents ample evidence from Ecuador and Guatemala, demonstrating convincingly that public health authorities there were up-to-date on the significant advances that had come in understanding yellow fever etiology. Carey also assesses the overall unevenness of the public health responses—measures that were too often racist, growing out of and serving to reinforce the racial biases of Ecuador and Guatemala.
Sity Daud, in “The COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis in Malaysia and the Social Protection Program,” evaluates poverty reduction programs that were started during the pandemic in Malaysia. Daud provides a critical appraisal of the statistical measurements that have been used to try to measure poverty, noting the many blind spots in aggregate poverty data. Malaysian authorities have often declared that poverty has been all but eradicated, but as one looks closer at the data it becomes quite clear that this is simply not the case. Within this context, Daud details the economic devastation brought on by the pandemic, tracing the human costs behind the depressing economic numbers. Daud offers some longer-term recommendations for social measures that should be put in place to deal with future potential pandemic outbreaks.
In “Sub-Sahara Africa and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Reflecting on Challenges and Recovery Opportunities,” Billy Agwanda, Gershon Dagba, Prince Opoku, Mark Opoku Amankwa and Israel Nyaburi Nyadera analyze the circumstances surrounding the efforts to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in Sub-Sahara Africa. As the pandemic spread to this region, one of the most impoverished in the world, experts offered dire predictions of greater suffering there than for any other place on earth. Surprisingly, Sub-Sahara Africa has so far not experienced these worst-case forecasts.
As Agwanda et al, explain the challenges in dealing with the pandemic in Sub-Sahara Africa are extreme. With chronically underfunded health care programs and extremely deficient public sanitation and water systems, Sub-Sahara Africa is in particularly poor position to deal with the health emergency. Social distancing is all but impossible; 7 of every 10 workers labor in the informal sector, living hand to mouth. Not working for a day means that the family goes without food that day. Added to this are the waves of social media misinformation regarding the virus. Advertisements hawking quack remedies have been sweeping over the airwaves. The Internet has become an unreliable source of information.
And yet, for all this, fewer people per capita are dying from the virus in the region when compared to most other nations in the world. This is not, as might be suspected, simply the artifice of under-reporting of COVID-19 cases and deaths. It is real; fewer people in Sub-Sahara Africa are getting COVID-19. Africa, with double the total population of Europe, has had a tenth of the cases of the virus.
The authors explore this unexpected circumstance, weighing the various efforts to explain this. This essay also explores the economic and social impacts of the pandemic, considering especially the long-term damage that has been done. Other diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, have been relatively ignored due to the pressing urgency of COVID-19. This has had deadly implications.