An Essay by a Future Historian on COVID-19

If I were a historian living in 2080, how would I view the South Korean government’s COVID-19 quarantine policies implemented 60 years earlier?

Between 2020 and 2080, there were multiple pandemic outbreaks over the course of 60 years. Nevertheless, the case of COVID-19 in 2020 carries a significance worthy of special remembrance. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the paradigm of quarantine changed into a “before COVID-19” and “after COVID-19” era, because the response to COVID-19 opened a new age of disease control unlike anything that had come before.

First, in 2020, although anti-COVID-19 measures differed somewhat from country to country, they shared certain common characteristics worldwide: the government “forced” so-called “social distancing” on the entire population, mask-wearing, and restrictions on the number of people allowed in crowded facilities and on operating hours—eventually to the point that many of those places were shut down altogether.

The South Korean government likewise appeared to be following this global trend. As 2020 progressed into its latter half, quarantine measures became increasingly stricter. For example, mandatory mask-wearing took effect on November 13 of that year. Small shops and business premises—the very lifeline of the self-employed—were also subjected to severe restrictions that winter.

Fortunately, as the following year began, restrictions on access to commercial facilities were partially eased. However, measures restricting people’s behavior—such as the ban on gatherings of five or more, mandatory mask-wearing, and the related reporting-and-reward system—remained in place for a considerable period in 2021 as well.

A phrase written on a government notice posted on a subway platform wall at the time gives a sense of the prevailing atmosphere: “Mask-wearing mandatory: from November 13 until further order.”

The fact that this open-ended quarantine measure—“until further order”—was accepted at the time without much resistance from the public is highly significant. Phrases like “until further order” are coercive expressions that would normally feel deeply unsettling to citizens of a free and democratic country. Yet, for some reason, Koreans in the early 2020s offered no resistance to a government that casually used such language in official notices.

Certainly, South Korea’s quarantine policy at the time can be described as repressive compared with societies such as the United States, where individual freedom and rights are valued above all else. For example, countries such as Germany were at the same time prohibiting the state from accessing mobile phone records and credit card usage history for quarantine purposes.

But the South Korean government carried out excessive epidemiological investigations and disclosures of personal information, such as tracing individuals’ movements through their mobile phones without their consent. That there was social criticism of this can be confirmed through many news articles from the time.

In other words, under the banner of quarantine, the government’s infringement on individuals’ freedom of action became routine in Korean society. Yet there was only a very limited space for open debate among medical experts on the virulence of the coronavirus—the very issue that should have been the most decisive consideration in judging quarantine policies that always carried the potential to invade individuals’ private sphere.

Public discussion surrounding COVID-19 was led mainly by government-driven epidemiological discourse focused on blocking transmission routes. By contrast, it is hard to find traces of active medical discussion or debate about what infection with the virus meant from an internal medicine or immunological standpoint.

Only occasionally were the views of doctors with differing perspectives quietly introduced in the media. For example, doctors in infectious disease medicine or public health generally supported strengthening quarantine measures. By contrast, some doctors in immunology-related fields cautiously expressed skepticism about those measures.

Clearly, when comparing the coronavirus with influenza, whether there existed a meaningful difference—especially in fatality rates—sufficient to justify coercive quarantine measures against the former was very much a matter of debate

(for example:

https://www.upinews.kr/newsView/upi202101150084

).

In fact, articles from that time criticizing government policy from an individualist perspective on the basis of such medical controversy were very rare.

The relationship between viral outbreaks and totalitarianism has long attracted the interest of many historians. For instance, the logic connecting the 1920 Spanish flu to the rise of European totalitarianism is historically quite familiar. And COVID-19 is no exception. As mentioned earlier, many countries introduced coercive quarantine measures at an early stage in response to COVID-19 in 2020.

From the beginning of 2020, people around the world monitored in real time, through Wikipedia and countless other internet sites, the number of confirmed cases and deaths by country, and gradually sank into an atmosphere of fear. In the early days, the spread of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China all but plastered the headlines and top stories of many media outlets. On YouTube, urgent video footage from medical personnel in Wuhan drew widespread attention. Koreans were terrified.

The people of the world in 2020, and Koreans among them, thus layered tremendous fear onto this virus named COVID-19. Sixty years later, one of the most fascinating questions left to historians is precisely this: “How was fear able to dominate the entire world so rapidly?” Given that there was persistent medical controversy at the time over whether the virulence and fatality rate of COVID-19 in fact differed meaningfully from influenza, the spread of such coercive quarantine regimes surely stands as one example of human irrationality.

In reality, the fatality rate could not even be determined accurately in 2020, and estimates varied widely from institution to institution. Furthermore, there were many limitations—in terms of medical rigor and healthcare statistics—in carefully comparing COVID deaths with the normal annual number of deaths from respiratory infections such as influenza and pneumonia. In other words, many people at the time, to a greater or lesser extent, seem to have had a distorted perception of the danger of COVID-19, based not on accurate understanding but on inaccurate evidence.

Indeed, the relationship between viral infection and totalitarianism was a subject of interest not only to historians but also to sociologists and the media. For example, a South Korean media article published in 2009, ten years before the outbreak of COVID-19, bore the title, “When Epidemics Spread, Only Those in Power Smile,” and ended with this sharp remark: “For those in power, there is no opportunity like an age of epidemics. Remembering this is as important as avoiding infection by the virus.” The article critically examined the wartime situation against the “monster virus” depicted in The Host, a film that had been a sensational hit in Korea at the time

(

https://www.sisain.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=4392

).

Why, then, did Korean society—which ten years before the arrival of COVID-19 had keenly recognized the threat posed by quarantine policy, a double-edged sword, to individuals’ private sphere—become so compliant in 2020 with such repressive quarantine policies? This cannot but be a truly fascinating subject in social history.

Min Bae, history teacher at Soongeui Girls’ High School

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Original title: 코로나19에 대한 어느 미래 역사가의 에세이

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2021-03-30

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=11&idx=23593