It is deeply depressing for liberals like me but it now seems clear that the only way to contain Covid and avoid an appalling loss of life and grave damage to the economy was to impose draconian restrictions on personal liberty and extreme intrusions into people’s privacy. 1/

The large countries which successfully limited the impact of the first wave and prevented a second wave from taking off all deployed some combination of border closures, travel bans, enforced confinement, and intrusive monitoring of personal data. China, Vietnam, South Korea. 2/

The staggering incompetence of the British government’s handling of every aspect of the pandemic should not blind us to the fact that almost all liberal democracies have suffered large numbers of deaths and serious economic distress. Even Germany. 3/

We can only hope that liberal democracies do better in rebuilding their economies and restoring social freedom. Because the authoritarian states have ‘won’ the pandemic hands down. END