“The pandemic has made them more accepting of harsh crackdowns that they previously would have resisted. I think this could be a long-term problem as political leaders gain power and infringe on human rights in the guise of an emergency. What is at stake is not only freedom, but also accountability and the rule of law.”

02:08

Manila goes into Easter lockdown as Philippines records more than 10,000 new daily cases

Manila goes into Easter lockdown as Philippines records more than 10,000 new daily cases

Shortly after the announcement on Saturday, the hashtag #DuterteResign was among the trending topics on Philippine Twitter. 

“Lockdowns are the ‘brute force’ approach to controlling the pandemic, and sadly this is the government’s only recourse, having failed to build mechanisms that would have allowed for more targeted, less economically harmful measures like robust contact tracing systems,” said Gideon Lasco, a doctor in Manila.

Many Filipinos have questioned why the government has not done a better job of managing the pandemic, with the country’s death toll of more than 13,000 being one of the highest in Southeast Asia. 

“We have the longest lockdown in the world and yet we have seen little to no improvement in our situation,” said a government employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

He said he was especially anxious about contracting the virus on his daily commute and passing it onto his elderly parents. “[At this rate] I think normal life will take two years, so much later than other countries,” he said. 

COMPLIANCE AND SUPPORT

Yet the broader trend has been public compliance and even enthusiastic support for Covid-19 restrictions. In a survey of residents in the Australian state of Victoria last year, more than 70 per cent of respondents said they supported a curfew and restrictions on leaving the home amid a spike in coronavirus infections, although support for restrictions fell in subsequent polling as cases declined. Citizens around the world have publicly shamed and reported people who violate social-distancing rules, in some cases leading to hefty fines or even jail for offenders.

Coronavirus recovery: Asia-Pacific must focus on three areas in its post-pandemic plans

Scientists have credited lockdowns with saving potentially millions of lives, with one Imperial College London study estimating that restrictions in Europe last year averted about 3.1 million deaths. 

“Societies have reached a point where they are generally much more accepting of lockdowns because of the cost that they see they have to bear otherwise,” said Teo Yik Ying, dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore.

03:36

Italy resumes partial coronavirus lockdown as country fights new wave of infections

Italy resumes partial coronavirus lockdown as country fights new wave of infections

“In my opinion, that would be a right advancement by a sensible government,” Teo said. “But while a sensible government will want to do this for good reasons, equally one can say a renegade government may abuse some of these privileges as well. The checks and balances always need to be there.”

George Williams, an expert on civil liberties at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said countries with existing authoritarian tendencies would be more susceptible to long-term illiberal change.

“There are of course many examples of this around the world where declarations of emergencies and the like have been used to this effect,” he said.

Williams said countries with firmly entrenched liberal democratic norms, such as Australia, were unlikely to see measures extended “beyond the immediate need”, but “the recency of these controls will make people much more susceptible to accepting them once again” during future crises.

Coronavirus: Boris Johnson unveils England’s path out of lockdown

EFFECTS ON LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

In Asia, numerous governments have faced charges of exploiting public health and disinformation concerns to stifle free speech and protest during the pandemic.

The authorities earlier this month introduced longer prison sentences for people accused of spreading pandemic misinformation, sparking a backlash from journalists and rights groups concerned the powers could be used to quash legitimate dissent. 

In Hong Kong, critics have accused authorities of using the pandemic as a pretext to postpone elections and arrest anti-government protesters, while the government of Cambodian strongman Hun Sen has arrested dozens of opposition figures and critics on charges related to the spread of information about Covid-19.

Hundreds have been arrested in India, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia on the grounds of spreading pandemic-related misinformation.

Democratic backsliding occurred in 87 countries and territories – including 22 democracies – last year, according to the 2021 Democracy Report by the V-Dem Institute, with two-thirds of jurisdictions imposing restrictions on the media and one-third implementing emergency measures without time limits. While concluding the pandemic’s “direct effects” on levels of liberal democracy were limited, the report warned that “longer-term consequences may be worse” and should be monitored closely. 

In some countries, authorities have been criticised for using the pandemic to tackle issues not related to public health.

In Singapore, the government belatedly admitted that its contact-tracing app could be used by police for criminal investigations, despite earlier assurances it would only be used to track the virus. The government later expressed regret over the controversy, introducing legislation to wind up the system once the pandemic is over.

In Australia, the premier of Western Australia flagged extending state border controls beyond the pandemic to tackle drug smuggling before doing a U-turn in the face of criticism, while police in the state have asked for new stop-and-search powers to be formalised in law.

Other pandemic measures have been condemned as excessively harsh, including Britain’s introduction of prison terms of up to 10 years for people who lie about their travel history – which led a former attorney general to decry the measure as “completely disproportionate”. 

Jais Adam-Troian, a social psychologist at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, said human beings had evolved with a strong negativity bias toward pathogens as it was “better to believe that there is a predator out there when the branch is moving” and be wrong, rather than the reverse.

He said there was a risk governments could be reluctant to broach the question of what level of virus prevalence would be acceptable for returning to normality in the likely scenario Covid-19 was never fully eliminated.

“There’s not going to be any ‘right time’ because it presupposes that the pandemic is going to disappear magically and apparently it’s sticking around,” Adam-Troian said, adding that it was conceivable societies could respond with draconian measures to future diseases that were far less deadly than Covid-19 – including the flu – due to our evolutionary hardwiring and unprecedented access to data compared with past generations.

Gostin of Georgetown University, who authored the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act after the 9/11 terror attacks, said it was “quite possible” the world would fall back on drastic measures in response to a future virus that was only half or even a quarter as deadly as Covid-19, which has a death rate about six times that of influenza. 

The public health expert, who previously described lockdowns as understandable given the pandemic threat, said he now feared a “new normal” defined by draconian responses to the pandemic.

“When China locked down all of Wuhan, I said it couldn’t happen in London, Paris, or New York,” Gostin said. “But it did. I fear that lockdowns and other excessive measures will return to haunt us when the next crisis hits. And we will have repeated crises going forward.”

Additional reporting by Elyssa Lopez in Manila