Pandemic 2020 review: Witness statements to a human collective failure

I didn’t realise before I watched the BBC’s excellent Pandemic 2020 that in the earlier stages of the coronavirus crisis, a three-piece folk band in Belarus had composed a patriotic song about the international public health emergency. Prancing along a deserted highway somewhere near Minsk, in an instantly recognisable grey post-Soviet landscape, Valery and the lads belted out their uplifting hit, “We Don’t Need You, Coronavirus” (which, to be fair, is an undeniable statement). The lyrics to the accordion- and baliaka-based track are subtitled for us:

“We don’t need you, coronavirus,

Stay in your foreign lands,

We don’t fear – hey, coronavirus!

You can’t make us stay at home,

For victory!”

As a morale booster the catchy tune was a winner – the sort of thing that helped the Soviet Union see off Hitler. As a defence against a virus with no ability to hear or understand the defiant sentiments expressed by the Belarusian songsters, it was less effective, and very possibly counter-productive. Alas.

Pandemic 2020 is not the first documentary film about the Covid pandemic and nor will it be the last – because as we all surely realise deep down, it is far from over. But Pandemic 2020, a three-parter, is certainly the best thus far, and, as with that Alexander Lukashenko-inspired dance band, the most authentically grass-roots international.

From the team behind Once Upon A Time in Iraq, it uses the same voice over freestyle and allows the story to be told by what you might call the common people, rather than politicians and scientists (no disrespect to them). With snatches of archive news coverage and official pronouncements, we hear first-hand and highly moving testimony of the dismay and distress the pandemic visited upon uncomprehending millions. Pandemic 2020 is basically a series of witness statements to a human collective failure, to help remind us about what happened, but also to offer insights from across the globe.

As this is the first plague in the era of the smartphone and iPad, there is plenty of first-hand material, unmediated and raw. We meet a community worker in Colombia, Carlos Vladimir, who shows how people in dire need would hang bits of red cloth from the windows to get donations of food. The pandemic has exacerbated and illuminated problems in society – equality, poverty, conflict, distrust of authority – that were not always so glaringly obvious in normal times. We meet a daughter in Iceland, Arny, whose elderly mum thought the virus was just a lot of fuss, until it caught up with her. The old lady, so tough before she succumbed to Covid, died alone in hospital. It is upsetting even to watch the heavily sedated mother try to communicate with her daughter via an iPad and a nurse in full protective gear. She speaks for many in these past months: “This is completely unbelievable, that a virus travels all the way from somewhere in China, all the way into the Westfjords, and into the nursing home where my mother lives. You just couldn’t, couldn’t understand what was going on… So this is a little more serious than a normal flu.” Amie, a doctor in Leamington Spa, is haunted by her first fatality, for whom she was a mere “bystander”.

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Pandemic 2020 isn’t deeply political, still less a lazy hit on an officialdom as bewildered as any of us at this unfamiliar disease. Yet there is enough footage of a young couple in Wuhan, Qiongyao Xie and Jim Yang, married just as Covid hit, to make the audience wonder why the early lessons from the place the disease originated were not acted on sooner. A year ago Chinese citizens in Wuhan were required to use their app and scan in and out of buildings and public transport, so that the authorities could trace the occupants of an indicator tube train carriage, and it helped them reopen their economy. Most western countries have still not managed to do that. Instead the likes of Donald Trump just sneered about the “China virus”.

The Chinese couple, reflecting on the rapid spears of the plague across the supposedly advanced western world, express themselves “surprised how slowly they took precautions”, even accounting for the western values of privacy and freedom. “Wouldn’t you prefer to make some concessions in order to stay alive?” In the coming months and years, we may learn more about that. For too many, it will be too late.