Social unrest is legacy of Covid-19 pandemic

“So when our Sickness, and our Poverty Had greater wants than we could well supply; Strict Orders did but more enrage our grief, And hinder in accomplishing relief.”
That’s how the British poet George Wither explained a spreading rebellion against social-distancing rules. Seeing quarantines and lockdowns as unfair and tyrannical punishments, people were taking to the streets. The year was 1625, the place was London, the disease was plague.
The same psychology brought some 20,000 people out on the streets of Leipzig last week. Flouting all rules, about 90% of the marchers refused to wear masks, according to police estimates. They represented a motley spectrum of conspiracy theorists and freedom lovers, of right-wing extremists and those simply nostalgic for East Germany’s peaceful revolution 31 years ago.
And this was only the latest of many such demonstrations this year, in Germany and dozens of other countries. People have marched, rioted or protested from Trafalgar Square to the Michigan Statehouse, sometimes armed with guns. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has counted more than 30 major protests in 26 countries between March and October just against coronavirus restrictions.
But the protests in Leipzig or Michigan, Britain or Australia,
only represent one category of unrest, reckon Carnegie’s Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press. These rallies vent the frustrations of relatively well-off people living in prosperous and functional democracies. In a different category, there are the many protests against governments or leaders suspected of being corrupt (Bulgaria, say), incompetent (Brazil) or demagogic, illiberal and even undemocratic.
Serbians took to the streets against their president, Aleksandar Vucic. He had lifted a lockdown to allow an election that was in his interest but ultimately contributed to a resurgence of the virus. He then imposed a second lockdown, which Serbs interpreted as a crackdown on dissent.
A third type of protest is more common in poor countries. It mobilises people not so much because they worry about the virus or democracy but because they fear for their livelihood. In Malawi, street vendors have marched with signs saying “We’d rather die of corona than of hunger.” The citizens of Ecuador have rioted against coronavirus policies that threaten to
impoverish them, including the shutdown of state-owned companies and salary cuts.
And then there are the many protests that ostensibly have little to do with Covid-19 but probably became more urgent or bitter in the pandemic’s context.
Black Lives Matter is an uprising against racial injustice that re-started in the US after the murder of George Floyd. It then spread to at least 16 other countries, from France and Britain to Brazil and South Africa. In history books, the iconography of mask-clad crowds will forever invite associations with the outbreak.
Despite new hopes for a vaccine, Covid-19 will now enter its deadliest phase in many regions entering winter. Even after we defeat the virus, many of its effects will linger for years.

—Bloomberg