The timing of the lockdown was crucial. Observing the spread-rate daily, it was evident that without action, there would be a doubling of cases every two to three days, and at that rate, millions would become infected within weeks. Poland took action when there were 81 confirmed cases and three deaths. Within two weeks of lockdown being imposed, the number of cases was doubling every seven days. Now, ten weeks into lockdown, it has taken a full 30 days for the number of cases to double from 10,000 to 20,000, which it did this very afternoon.
The UK government dithered, lost time, got bad advice. Lockdown was imposed on 23 March, when the number of case was already 6,650 and the death toll 81. By then, the spread rate was out of the box. It took just three and half days in late March for the number of cases in the UK to double from 10,000 to 20,000. Today, the latest number of confirmed cases broke through the quarter-million barrier. Twelve and half times more cases in a country that's not quite double Poland's population.
Yet the early lockdown is not the complete story. I have been tracking Google Mobility, a set of metrics gathered from users of Google Maps on their mobile phones. It shows that more Poles have been going to their places of work than Britons. In the week ending 13 May, the number of Britons who visited their usual workplace was 61% down on baseline, while it Poland, it was just 30% down. How many people are working from home in both countries is an important measure, which I shall address.
What's going on? I've long held that the UK economy has become over-dependent on services. The World Bank says that the value added to the UK economy by manufacturing, construction and agriculture totals just 17.5% of its GDP. The rest is services. Poland's economy has manufacturing, construction and agriculture contributing 28.6% of the value added to its GDP.
The first few days of lockdown showed exactly which jobs were crucial to maintaining social order. Food retailing and the retail supply chain, logistics and of course the health service. And which jobs were less important - public relations, fashion, and new-car showrooms. The notion of 'bullshit jobs' was held up to the glare of harsh reality and proved correct.
With the spread rate down to acceptable levels, the lockdown is easing, but the authorities are on guard in case infections start accelerating again. Eyes are now on the economy. How deep will the second quarter fall in GDP prove to be across the UK and Poland? And how quickly will the economies be able to dig themselves out of the hole in the third and fourth quarters?
I have one cherished theory which I believe is another factor in why the virus didn't hit Poland as hard as the UK, and is also a factor in why Poland's economic downturn won't be as severe or as long as the UK's.
It is to do with learned dependence. The UK experienced the Industrial Revolution around 250 years ago. This means that there are families in Britain where ten generations have lived and died in an industrial, rather than agricultural setting. No initiative was needed to fend for oneself; the mill-owner provided work and paid a salary; housing, food and clothes were within reach of most industrial workers even if conditions were grim. By contrast, being an agricultural smallholder meant taking full responsibility for oneself and one's family; to survive you had to tend crops and livestock, harvest, store, and sell your produce.
Poland was still largely agricultural into the second half of the 20th century. To this day, a greater percentage of Poles lives in the countryside than Britons did in the mid-1860s. Many of my Polish friends' and colleagues' parents farmed smallholdings.
This closeness to the land gives people a mental toughness, a resilience that is not evident on the surface as Poles do tend to complain a lot ("to tragedia, Panie - koszmar, masakra!"), but in the end, they get on with it. This determination to get on is also the result of a much harder history; continual invasions, wars and uprisings which resulted in a family's savings wiped out. Smaller land holdings (in central Poland, at least), had a far greater chance of surviving the turbulence (the larger ones were split up and redistributed after WWII).
Poland's economy has grown without missing a single quarter for the past 28 years. It kept growing in 2009 when most of the developed world was mired in recession. There are many other reasons for that - a robust banking sector and devaluation of an independent zloty among them - but I would argue that 'fire in the belly' and lack of a learned dependence on The Man also kept Poland moving forward.
It is not just the developed economies of the West that will feel the Covid-19 effect more acutely than Poland; Russia, Belarus and Brazil have been hard hit too in terms of the disease's spread. Where the people look to a protective leader to shield them from harm, be it economic or epidemiological, and that leader fails, there will be repercussions.
Covid-19 has not let Poland go - yet. The spread rate obstinately refuses to fall, with the number of confirmed infections doubling each month. But there are strong regional differences, with Śląskie province reporting between half and two-thirds of the daily new cases confirmed each day this past week. In Lubuskie or Podlaskie provinces, for instance, new cases are a handful a day. Poland's economy should only open up where and when it is safe to do so.
And there is the danger of a second wave of infection - "just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water". This may well hit Poland late this autumn/winter; the virus might mutate into something deadlier. So my predictions based on gut instinct might be swept away. But for the time being, I'll stick to my view that Poland will have one quarter of steep downturn, one quarter of mild downturn, and then recovery.
This time last year:
Electric cars for hire by the minute
Electric cars for hire by the minute
This time four years ago:
Mszczonów - another railway junction
This time eight years ago:
The Devil is in Doubt - short story, part I
This time nine years ago:
Stormclouds are raging all around my door
This time ten years ago:
Floods endanger Warsaw
This time 11 years ago:
Coal line rarity
Mszczonów - another railway junction
This time eight years ago:
The Devil is in Doubt - short story, part I
This time nine years ago:
Stormclouds are raging all around my door
This time ten years ago:
Floods endanger Warsaw
This time 11 years ago:
Coal line rarity
Posts
6 comments:
There is an interesting hipotesis on remarkably lower death rate in Poland and similar EE countries: compulsory vaccinations. We do not have COVID vaccine yet, but many types of other vaccines that Poles are required to take may be correlated to much lower coronavirus death rate. Nothing solid to support that hypothesis yet, but low death rate in Poland is worth investigating.
@Anonymous - yes, I'd read about the prevalence of compulsory BCG vaccinations and lower mortality rate. Indeed, a strand of investigation definitely worth following!
A couple of thoughts. Firstly, 531/25 isn't 35. In my head I would say it's twenty one and a bit.
Secondly, as far as bullshit jobs are concerned, as someone whose profession has been relegated to the non-essential I would just like to say, fine, we accountants can sit in the garden for a few weeks and then it's "oh, where's the accountant? Where's the payroll clerk? I need to be paid for my essential job."
On the topic of needing to be paid, have you noticed that all the public sector people who are first in line to be deemed it "essential" are also, like the private sector, taxpayers. So what does their tax go to? Well, what they pay in tax is the same amount as the extra they need to be paid in order to pay that tax. Their take-home pay is entirely courtesy of taxes paid by the private sector.
So unless they are volunteers, or willing to work for nothing, I don't wanna even hear any tax paying job in the private sector dismissed as "bullshit" or "non-essential".
It's Eidh al Fitr today so a quote from Islam would not go amiss: "if someone equips a warrior, it is the same as going to Jihad himself". So I say, if someone is paying taxes to fund the work of an essential worker in the fight against Corvids, he or she is also an essential worker in the fight against Corvids.
@ David, the 521/25 is per million the 35 times is in absolute numbers.
'Bullshit jobs' - accountancy certainly isn't a bullshit job! If you can't measure it, you can't manage it! An economy could survive a week or two in the case of a national accountants' strike (there's a thought!), but long term it would lead to business and government flying blind. In the medium- to long term, much of the data-entry work carried out by bookkeepers will be automated, accountancy will become a more value-added profession at the top end; without decent management accountants it's impossible to run a business.
But there comes a point where there's an imbalance in the structure of an economy; the UK has long passed that point. If you want a country that lives off the export of services to pay for its import of goods - fine, but don't go and chop off your biggest export market because migrunts.
“To tragedia, Panie - koszmar, masakra” - Laugh out loud! How many times In my past, did I hear that phrase (always spoken with much flourish and hand gesticulation). So many times. Very much miss hearing Polish, now that both parents are gone. Thanks for the fond memory.
The use of absolute numbers is misleading. It is already misleading if we are talking about a country with 60% of the population of the UK, but you could just as easily use absolute numbers to compare the USA to San Marino. San Marino has far fewer people altogether than the USA has cases, but the rate per million in San Marino is worse than the States. That's why I only talk about the per million figure, although I wish they would make it a per thousand figure, we can related to that more easily.
Thanks for the nice comments about accountancy.
As far as migration is concerned, the issue may have influenced the vote in the referendum, but right now since we have had:
a) a major Black swan event in which the EU didn't come out with a great deal of credit but certainly a space has been shown up where having an effective EU would be better than falling back onto the WHO,
b) disgruntlement on the practicalities of how we share the rights to things we also helped to build, like the crime database,
c) the demographic which voted for remaining, namely the younger voters, now being more than the critical number greater in the electorate as the older ones have upgraded their physical regime to an heavenly, we don't know what the vote would be if we voted today
d) persons like myself were not even allowed to vote having been more than 15 years out of the UK pursuing the EU dream and not beig warned at the time that we were going to end up voting in no place but paying taxes everywhere, and as an interested party we should not have been ignored in the vote
e) Merkel and Obama whom persons in the UK found objectionable for steering us to remain are either gone or soon to be gone, while Trump and Macron, for different reasons, or maybe not so different, cannot wait for the UK to leave which rather makes us a bit more reticent about it now, and
f) far more info now about how aspects like Ireland and Cyprus, Gibraltar and other issues will affect the whole severing and complicate it
g) an increased need to be at unity with a bloc with regard to China and Russia, and to a degree the more powerful Islamic states also means that we are also probably safer in than out.
All these arguments mean that another vote ought to take place prior to the enactment of whatever package we get is enforced, with a reversal of the 31st January action with no harm if we do vote to remain.
If we extend the transition period, then the arguments given above are likely to apply all the more and be even more persuasive after another year or two of dithering, and quite frankly our economy needs all the boost it can get after the mishandling of the covid 19 crisis by our politicians more than the average mess you get in our continent.
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