It was a moment of chilling clarity. On Feb. 26, with the numbers of Italians known to be infected by COVID-19 tripling every 48 hours, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte appealed to other EU member states for help.
His hospitals were overwhelmed. Italian doctors and nurses had run out of the masks, gloves and aprons that they needed to keep themselves safe, and medics were being forced to play God with the lives of the critically ill due to an acute lack of ventilators.
An urgent message was passed from Rome to the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels. The specifications of Italy’s needs were uploaded into the EU’s Common Emergency Communication and Information System.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, what happened next came as a shock — the distress call was met with silence.
“No member state responded to Italy’s request and to the commission’s call for help,” European Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic said. “This meant that not only was Italy not prepared, but nobody was prepared. The lack of response to the Italian request was not so much a lack of solidarity, but a lack of equipment.”
The true number of COVID-19 deaths is almost certainly higher than so far recorded, and the continent is on an unalterable course to the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, largely as a result of the lockdowns required to shield its many underfunded healthcare systems.
Leaders have been asked fundamental questions about the purpose of the European project when states fail to come to each other’s aid at the darkest of times.
An analysis of internal records and interviews with dozens of EU officials and experts can tell the full story of how Europe emerged to be the WHO-designated “epicenter” of the global COVID-19 pandemic and what key lessons might be learned.
It is the story of an EU caught ill-equipped and institutionally incapable of mounting an adequate response to the crisis that so swiftly engulfed it.
NEW YEAR ALERT
It was as millions of Europeans prepared for their New Year’s Eve celebrations that officials in the Stockholm office of the EU public health agency, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), first received notice of a cluster of pneumonia cases in China of unknown origin.
The ECDC, established in 2005 in reaction to the SARS outbreak two years before, offers scientific advice and sounds the alarm, but responsibility for health remains entirely with the national governments of the EU.
The agency on Jan. 9 gave its first threat assessment, ECDC Director Andrea Ammon said.
“At that time, the notion [was] that most of the cases were linked to this live animal market [in Wuhan, China],” she said. “Roughly two weeks later it turned out that it is human-to-human transmission, which of course changes what you need to do.”
The initial concern was how to keep the disease outside the EU’s borders.
A first COVID-19 conference call was on Jan. 17 held by another EU body born out of previous health crises — but again lacking the powers retained by the national governments.
The commission’s Health Security Committee is comprised of health ministry representatives from each member state and has been responsible for coordinating cross-border health threat responses in Europe since the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009.
However, on Jan. 17, just 12 of the 27 member states, plus the UK, telephoned in.
Wolfgang Philipp, head of the Unit for Crisis Management and Preparedness in Health in the commission’s Public Health, Country Knowledge, Crisis Management Directorate, chaired the meeting and told those present that a few dozen people in Wuhan had been infected with a new strain of coronavirus.
With 300,000 people expected to travel to Europe from China that month, many to celebrate the Lunar New Year on Jan. 25, the question was what to do about direct flights from Wuhan to London, Paris and Rome.
The UK and France shared information about what they were doing at airports, but there was no update from the Italian government, one of the many absentees.
The Italian representative had not noticed the e-mail inviting him to the meeting.
The committee had planned to release recommendations on border measures, but those who did attend could not agree. It was an ominous sign of the difficulties that the commission would face.
Although governments are required to inform the Health Security Committee before implementing measures, unilateral action would repeatedly be taken in the subsequent weeks.
DISTRACTED BY BREXIT
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was just a few weeks into her new job.
Von der Leyen, a physician before embarking on a political career that would take her to the German Federal Ministry of Defense, possesses a significant intellect, sources who worked with her during the crisis said, but some within the system would come to wonder whether she might have done more in those first weeks.
“The commission should have taken a grip earlier,” one EU official said. “Von der Leyen is clever, but she is new to Brussels and relies on a couple of people from Berlin who also do not have experience of the commission and what is possible. You don’t ask the member states if they want coordination, you just coordinate. Health is a national competence, but you can push things.”
If it was a stuttering start by a Brussels novice, the seriousness of what was happening in China was at least understood early in some parts of the commission.
A swift decision was taken by the commission to ban its staff from non-essential travel to China and a news conference was called for Jan. 29 to communicate a clear message: Get ready.
However, if the alarm bells were sounding in Brussels, the media had other interests: The UK was about to leave the EU after 47 years of membership.
“We went to the news conference and the press room was almost empty,” Lenarcic said. “We called for preparedness — for all member states to take this seriously and prepare. There was a lot of echo because of the empty room, but we were still hoping that there would be some echo in the media the next day. We didn’t find much of that because all the media attention in Brussels was, at that time, devoted to the last session of the European Parliament plenary where the UK members participated.”
It was not only the newspapers and broadcasters failing to listen to the siren voices from the EU’s executive branch and agencies.
THREAT UNDERESTIMATED
The ECDC in the same week advised governments to strengthen the capacities of their hospitals and, in particular, their intensive care units, but the urgency of the warning did not hit home in the capitals.
“I think what turned out is that they underestimated, in my view, the speed of how this increase came,” Ammon said. “Because it is a different situation if you have to look for an increase in capacity of beds within two weeks or two days.”
The virus was continuing to quietly seed. On Jan. 30, two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive for COVID-19. The Italian government immediately banned all flights to and from China, and sought a meeting of EU health ministers to push for stricter entry screening measures across Europe.
However, the meeting took three weeks to organize.
The Croatian government, responsible for convening it as holder of the rolling EU Council presidency, had become embroiled in a financial scandal during which Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovi had been forced to fire then-minister of health Milan Kujundzic.
By the time health ministers did finally meet on Feb. 13, pockets of cases were sprouting.
The stark reality was that in the months and years before the coronavirus arrived in Europe, stocks of personal protective equipment (PPE) had dwindled. Emergency supplies of masks had expired, been destroyed and never replaced. Pandemic preparedness plans were out of date.
“Several European countries had strategic stocks of protective masks that were outdated,” one scientific adviser said. “Most of them were just destroyed.”
France in 2011 held 1.7 billion protective masks, but now had only 117 million. Between January and March, it incinerated 1.5 million masks. In 2017, Belgium ordered the destruction of 38 million masks — and they were never replaced.
“My colleague [European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety] Stella Kyriakides was asking for data all along,” Lenarcic said. “They started early on and according to my information, they never received the full data that would allow the commission to have a clear picture about the stockpiles of equipment and capacities of intensive care units.”
RED-HOT ANGER
By the weekend of Feb. 29 and March 1, more than 2,000 people were infected in Europe. In Italy, 35 people had died.
Von der Leyen decided to put herself at the forefront of the crisis. She informed Lenarcic that the scale of the crisis required a crisis response team of commissioners covering everything from health to the economy and borders.
The new team was presented to the public on that Monday, but within hours, Europeans witnessed one of the biggest failings of the entire pandemic: Individual European countries, each now in full-blown crisis mode, acted to impose restrictions on the export of key medical supplies to neighbors.
French President Emmanuel Macron on March 3 announced that he was requisitioning “all stocks and the production of protective masks.”
The next day, the German government banned the export of PPE.
A total of 15 member states placed restrictions on the movement of equipment or drugs within the EU during the outbreak. Trucks of masks, gloves and protective gowns were stopped at some borders.
The Belgian and Dutch governments were buying up the ingredients to make key drugs and delivering them to hospitals to be produced on-site.
With a limited supply of these ingredients in Europe, the move hamstrung efforts by the pharmaceutical industry to increase the manufacture of medicines needed to treat the most severe COVID-19 cases.
By the time that European health ministers attended a second council meeting on March 6, Kyriakides, flanked by Lenarcic and European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, felt the need to stress the importance of European unity.
“I ask you all today to commit to us all working together, openly and transparently, in a spirit of solidarity to ensure a coherent political response,” Kyriakides said.
Yet just a few days later, Germany unilaterally closed its borders, bringing the continent to a halt, with news footage showing traffic backed up for 50km at the German-Polish border.
“It is not a problem to close the border, but you have to talk to your neighbor on the other side of it and some didn’t,” Lenarcic said. “That was wrong and created a lot of problems.”
There was red-hot anger at the commission’s headquarters.
“The commission acted forcefully and immediately to persuade all of those member states that indulged in such selfish measures,” Lenarcic said.
To placate those claiming that there were “people running around Europe with big bags of cash buying everything they could at any price,” the commission agreed to an export authorization scheme to control what equipment left the bloc, Lenarcic said.
NO PPE ON THE MARKET
It was a scenario surely unimaginable even just a few weeks earlier. From March 9, starting with Italy, and ending on March 23, when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally followed suit, Europe’s governments shut down their economies one by one. Only Sweden went its own way.
For some, it was all too late.
“If Italy could have done it 10 or 14 days before, it would have been better. The Ministry of Health wanted to do that, but it took time to convince the government,” Walter Ricciardi, a senior adviser to the ministry, said. “But they [the other member states] knew the Italian experience and they didn’t follow it. It was very difficult for ministers of health to convince ministries of finance and prime ministers that this was a serious situation.”
On March 12, Von der Leyen’s experts told her that the outbreak in Europe could not be stopped. The following day, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that Europe was the new “epicenter” of the global pandemic.
“At the time, we had a desperate need of PPE and ventilators, and it was almost impossible to find it on the market,” Ricciardi said. “So our call was distribution of what was present in Europe and joint procurement, but it took two months to do that. Not for lack of willingness of the European Commission, but the process was so slow and bureaucratic. We only had ventilators when our acute situation was over.”
The commission had in mid-January raised the idea of a joint procurement of PPE, of becoming “one big buyer,” but had been faced with a lack of interest from the member states.
It was not until Feb. 5 that it was decided to launch a formal assessment of what PPE member states might need. It then took two weeks, and a number of missed deadlines, for governments to hand over the information.
By then global stocks had been severely depleted and the member states, waking up to their predicament, were individually contacting Chinese manufacturers, creating further competition in the market place.
The commission had to take the initiative as it became apparent that the joint procurement scheme was proving ineffective. Emergency legislation was rushed through to allow the commission to build a central stockpile.
NOBODY COULD HELP
While member states would be responsible for procuring the supplies, the commission would manage their distribution and cover most of the costs. Hundreds of thousands of masks have been distributed so far to pandemic hotspots.
Lenarcic said he believes that this is the model to follow as leaders come together in Brussels today to discuss their seven-year budget and plans for a one-off recovery fund.
“The whole logic is give the commission the means to support member states more, because when Italy asked for help, nobody could give help,” Lenarcic said.
“I see one very clear lesson,” he added. “There is a wish of an overwhelming majority of the European public to have more Europe on issues like this.”
Ricciardi agrees, saying that the ECDC should be a decisionmaking body, not just advisory, and that the commission has to be given its head when coordination is vital.
“The member states must learn that we need to prepare for this new normality — this will only be the first of a series of events,” Ricciardi said.
I came to Taiwan to pursue my degree thinking that Taiwanese are “friendly,” but I was welcomed by Taiwanese classmates laughing at my friend’s name, Maria (瑪莉亞). At the time, I could not understand why they were mocking the name of Jesus’ mother. Later, I learned that “Maria” had become a stereotype — a shorthand for Filipino migrant workers. That was because many Filipino women in Taiwan, especially those who became house helpers, happen to have that name. With the rapidly increasing number of foreigners coming to Taiwan to work or study, more Taiwanese are interacting, socializing and forming relationships with
Whether in terms of market commonality or resource similarity, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co is the biggest competitor of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC). The two companies have agreed to set up factories in the US and are also recipients of subsidies from the US CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law by former US president Joe Biden. However, changes in the market competitiveness of the two companies clearly reveal the context behind TSMC’s investments in the US. As US semiconductor giant Intel Corp has faced continuous delays developing its advanced processes, the world’s two major wafer foundries, TSMC and
We are witnessing a sea change in the government’s approach to China, from one of reasonable, low-key reluctance at rocking the boat to a collapse of pretense over and patience in Beijing’s willful intransigence. Finally, we are seeing a more common sense approach in the face of active shows of hostility from a foreign power. According to Article 2 of the 2020 Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法), a “foreign hostile force” is defined as “countries, political entities or groups that are at war with or are engaged in a military standoff with the Republic of China [ROC]. The same stipulation applies to
The following case, which I experienced as an interpreter, illustrates that many issues in Taiwan’s legal system originate from law enforcement personnel. The problem stems not so much from their education and training, but their personal attitude — characterized by excessive self-confidence paired with a lack of accountability. One day at 10:30am, I was called to a police station in New Taipei City for an emergency. I arrived an hour later. A man was tied to a chair, having been arrested at the airport due to an outstanding arrest warrant. It quickly became apparent that the case was related to
RSS