Poor Leadership in Emergent Change: US and UK State Heads’ Response to COVID-19 in Early 2020

Pandemic comes

In early 2020, doctors in Wuhan, China identified a type of atypical lung infection, which is now widely known as COVID-19 (Page J, 2021). However, as this is becoming a worldwide pandemic affecting almost every region on the blue marble (World Health Organization, 2022). COVID-19 is an emergent change, as it is not intentional or planned, and is highly unpredictable (UCIL, 2022).

Facing this new and fast-changing situation, leaders of nations all took different approaches to tackle it. In this blog post, we will be looking into actions taken by UK PM and the US President at that time, as actions by both are controversial.

The UK’s first response is weak and intended to promote herd immunity and is believed to be not only ineffective but life-consuming, while bringing NHS under extreme pressure. (Cummings, 2021; House of Commons, 2021) Although herd immunity works in general and is key in disease prevention for several other viruses (Vaccine Knowledge Project, University of Oxford), the cost of achieve this level of protection would be high while there is no assurance regarding the effectiveness in the long term (Boseley, 2020).

Meanwhile, first actions taken by the US government is more reasonable and makes more sense. White house announced the establishment of a task force as early as 29^th January (Samuels, 2020) and a public health emergency was declared just two days later (Aburey, 2020), and the first SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test kit was approved to use on 4^th February (CDC, 2022). Multiple travel bans were also placed to regions where COVID-19 is getting widely spread, with UK included (Snyder, 2020), while regional bans on certain activities are also introduced (Allen, 2020).

Then, time comes to mid-March 2020, when both leaders started to lose their trust.

Leadership, no longer

On 27^th March, PM Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock tested positive for the coronavirus (BBC, 2022; Merrick, 2022), with PM admitted to the hospital and then brought to the ICU in merely 12 days of time (BBC, 2020; BBC, 2020). Starting from 2 April 2020 and onwards, UK government started to strengthen its measures in response, starting with the 5-pillar plan (Department of Health & Social Care, 2020).

It was far from a good practice, especially when everyone knows that herd immunity was the government’s plan. It looks like the infection of the PM is why the nation gets a more effective countermeasure. Boris Johnson has been making himself a character close to people with his messy blond hair, but potentially acting in his self-interest is not morally uplifting, and may be considered as pseudo transformational leadership (UCIL, 2022).

On the contrary, the US President Donald Trump has decided to speak whatever he believes may be correct. One of the most infamous ones is publicly suggesting injecting disinfectant and irradiating UV light as treatments are ‘great thing to look at’ because he is ‘a person that has a good you-know-what.’ (BBC, 2020) He also claimed that “99%” of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless” (Relman, 2020), among a long list of other lies regarding the coronavirus that makes no sense at all (Paz, 2020).

To make one’s leadership work, the leader requires building relationships and trust between them and their followers (UCIL, 2022); as public a servant, presidents shall act in the interest of the greater good (UCIL, 2022). but Mr. Trump’s actions are only destroying them. The disinfectant statement made RB, maker of Lysol and Dettol, to warn the general public this is not the way their products should be used (Reckitt, 2020), and the NYC has witnessed an increasing number of emergencies of people having sanitising products mixed into bodily fluids (Slotkin, 2020).

Up until now, we have looked into the means they have failed the expectations of their followers and the nations that count on them. Next, we shall have a deeper dive into the common points and the differences of their actions and motives.

Quick judgement hurts

There are three types of problems – Wicked, Tame and Critical.  (Grint, 2005) Now we know that COVID-19 is, without doubt, a Wicked problem. It matches all three factors of being a wicked problem: a) we don’t exactly know what the problem is – we have little knowledge regarding this new virus; b) we certainly don’t know what all the options are – this is unprecedented, all options are from hypothesises; and c) we don’t necessarily know what the right answer is – we do not even today. (UCIL, 2022)

From the diagram we can see that for wicked problems, leadership response involves asking the right questions rather than providing the right answers. (UCIL, 2022) Yet, when a wicked problem come as an emergent change, it is not rare for leaders to misjudge them as tame or critical ones, especially under time pressure.

As of Boris Johnson’s case, as he believes in the NHS and regulations in-place would react to this as they should, so it is very likely that he has categorised the COVID problem as a ‘tame problem’. On first sights, it indeed matches the descriptions provided by Keith Grant:

A Tame Problem may be complicated but is resolvable through unilinear acts because there is a point where the problem is resolved and it is likely to have occurred before. In other words, there is only a limited degree of uncertainty and thus it is associated with Management.

(Grint, 2005)

But has this problem occurred before? Arguably, not. Although we have seen though history various pandemics like the Spanish Flu and HIV/AIDS, but we do not have such frequent aeroplane travelling by 1920 and the HIV do not transmit airborne.

It is also worth mentioning that our ‘experiences’ regarding Spanish Flu is far from satisfactory, as it has caused tens of millions of deaths (Spreeuwenberg, Kroneman, & John, 2018) (Morens & Fauci, 2007) (Johnson & Mueller, 2002) and chronicled how governments may fail and healthcare systems get overloaded.

In fact, China has already prompted the surge of healthcare demand as they have to assemble medical teams across the nation (World Health Organization, 2020). Yet, wrong classification still led to the NHS got overwhelmed (Pagel, 2021).

Everything is not under control

Things are a bit different at the United States, where the main obstructions seem to be the presidential need of assuring the nation for the upcoming election. And to do so, he need to move the pandemic to the past tense as quick as possible to show his command. 

The way he dealt with this problem is to treat this as a ‘critical’ question, where decisive actions are being taken as commands when there is very little time for decision-making and action, and there is virtually no uncertainty about what needs to be done. (UCIL, 2022)

To maximum this assurance, President Trump has announced a ’30 days to slow the spread’ guideline (The White House, 2020), and promised that this ‘will rally (Americans) together as one nation and we will defeat the virus’, which later extended to 45 days (Keith, Ordonez, Rascoe, & Rampton, 2020).

Although it is true that COVID requires a rapid response, the scale, background of this pandemic had never been experienced before so falling back on pre-prepared cookbook responses was not enough, nor will it work as expected. (UCIL, 2022) Adding to that, the U.S. Government knew that their response to a pandemic of this scale will be lacking through a joint exercise conducted in 2019. (Stracqualursi, 2020)

It is worth mentioning that the United States remain the country with most cases until today (John Hopkins University, 2022) (World Health Organization, 2022).

Summary

In this post, we have looked into the practices of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson when facing the emergent change of COVID-19. It is always hard to be a leader of a state, but a clear mind is what needed to navigate the country though impacts unknown, one that is not will most likely lead to a disaster.

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