Dear Leader: Lessons on leadership in the time of pandemic

*Originally published on April 28, 2020.

By Nahlah Ayed

As the death toll mounted, the authorities could no longer keep the news hidden. People of all ages were dropping dead, and the questions were mounting among the living. 

You'd be forgiven for mistaking that as a description of events in Wuhan, China, where coronavirus originated and its outbreak remained undisclosed for weeks.

That scenario, however, unfolded in Hamburg, Germany, back in 1892, when it became the only major Western city to experience a cholera outbreak that year. 

The autonomous city-state within the German empire was ruled by merchant elites who held onto their belief that cholera was transmitted through "miasma" or "bad air." By then, science had proven it was caused by bacteria that could be transmitted from human to human through water or food.

That early example of denialism — and the decision to suppress the news of the outbreak for more than a week — lead to the deaths of nearly 10,000 people.

It also shook up Hamburg's political scene.

"The legitimacy of the government was very severely shaken, not just because of the initial reluctance to admit [cholera] was there, but then also the failure to deal with it," says Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Europe, provost of Gresham College London, and Distinguished fellow of the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public policy.  

In national elections the following year, an unhappy electorate — the working class — gave all the city's parliament seats to the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Could there be more dramatic political fallout in our own time? It depends on how long the crisis goes on, and what decisions governments make in the interim, Evans told CBC IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.

Initially, many of today's leaders and governments are polling at all time highs — as is usual in a major crisis — but there are already signs that the love-in isn't going to last. Some leaders, like Trump, have started slipping in the polls.
There have been some anti-lockdown protests in the U.S. but remarkably most people ordered to stay home have done exactly that.

In Hamburg, citizens were cooperative when Berlin dispatched leading German scientist and Nobel Prize winner Robert Koch to help staunch the outbreak.

Koch arranged for disinfection, free distribution of clean water, and a special hospital for cholera victims. His advocacy led to the filtration of drinking water and other measures to help the city track and manage disease.

"The political effects of the epidemic were found not in protests against medical intervention but in the Social Democrats' use of the disaster to pillory the state administration for serving the interests of a rich minority and neglecting the health and safety of the mass of ordinary people," Evans said in one of his six Gresham College lectures entitled: The Great Plagues: Epidemics in history from the middle ages to the present day.

Hamburg's experiences echo in today's pandemic: from U.S. President Donald Trump's initial downplaying of the threat, to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's outright denialism, to China's and the U.S.'s delays in implementing quarantine.
Good leadership in health crises can arguably best be measured by government and leaders' relationship to top health officials.

The prominence of chief scientists and physicians in the coronavirus crisis reflects power drawn from the progress of science that was centuries in the making. It is crucial for governments to be able to persuade millions of people to stay home.

And while Trump for example has demonstrated little patience for such officials — and has floated dangerous ideas like injecting disinfectants as a possible cure for COVID-19 — Evans predicts the crisis will lead to a renewal in the trust in scientific expertise. It will also likely increase demand for more government.

"Societies will get more accepting of state intervention," he said.

"People ask questions like, 'OK, if you can get all the homeless, 9,000 homeless people in the UK off the streets in a weekend during the epidemic, why can't you do that in normal times?'" 

Hamburg's experience provides some lessons for current and future leaders faced with public health crises.

"Listen to the scientists … and listen to majority science, don't listen to alternative scientists," said Evans.

"Don't try and hush it up, whatever the cost may be."
 

* This episode was produced by Nahlah Ayed.