Covid 19 coronavirus: The world leaders embracing denial, quackery and conspiracy

Short of war, there are few tougher tests for a government than the arrival of a new plague.

The spread of the new coronavirus has killed hundreds of thousands and upended the world. Dealing with an unknown pandemic, even one so widely predicted, has needed fast, drastic decisions across government, with little information to go on.

Faced with such a trial, many countries and their leaders have tried to do their best, some with precious few resources, and attempted to follow best practice and medical advice to protect their people.

Yet a small group of others have stood out by instead forging their own distinct paths. Across the world, some of these outliers have at times embraced a mixture of denial, quackery, conspiracy-mongering and the plain bizarre.

For example, while most African states have been commended for their quick reactions to the pandemic, the baffling course the Tanzanian government has taken has marked it out as one of the most worrying on the continent.

Tanzania's president John Magufuli has turned the country's pandemic response into a farce. Photo / Getty

The East African nation of 58m recorded its first coronavirus case on March 16. The government initially reacted by banning public gatherings, closing schools and placing some people arriving in the country in quarantine.

But as the weeks went by the situation turned into a deadly farce. The president, John Magufuli, soon started to tear up the country's coronavirus plan. In April, he scorned social distancing measures and urged people to go to church so divine intervention could cure the "satanic" virus. Later, he said inhaling steam would "disintegrate" the coronavirus.

As reports started to spread of overwhelmed hospitals and videos of dead bodies in the street emerged on social media in late April, the strongman accused the national laboratory of sabotage. He claimed he had secretly sent samples from a goat and papaya to the lab, which had come back positive and the overall figures were inflated.

Few can challenge him. Magufuli has spent the past four years in power filling his government with allies. Security services routinely torture or imprison opponents.

"No one in his administration who dares to question him any more," one senior source said. "The big guy has decided the virus is no longer a present. Everyone has to obey."

Officially Tanzania has 509 cases of coronavirus and 21 deaths. But Magufuli has suspended the head of the national laboratory and no data has been released since April 29. The government has made it a criminal offence to distribute non-governmental data about Covid.

The US embassy last month warned its citizens the risk of infection was high and that hospitals in the giant city of Dar es Salaam were being "overwhelmed". Soon after, a top government official proclaimed that God had defeated the virus, and people should go out onto the streets and celebrate.

Meanwhile in Madagascar, the president has said his country will test an injectable version of a herbal tea he claims prevents and cures Covid-19.

Andry Rajoelina, the island nation's populist leader, launched "Covid-Organics" to push a remedy developed by the Madagascar Institute of Applied Research. The cure contains a cocktail of traditional herbs, including Artemisia, anti-malaria wormwood.

A man gets his bottle filled with a herbal extract believed to protect from Covid-19, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Photo / AP

The country's national academy of medicine and the World Health Organisation have warned people not to take the unproven cure. Rajoelina has brushed the caution aside.

Such disdain for public health advice would be all too familiar to citizens of Belarus.

President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994, has rejected any restrictions designed to stop the spread of coronavirus since the start of the epidemic in Europe.

He mocked Russia for imposing lockdown restrictions and went as far as to suggest that "not a single person" had died of Covid-19 in his country. Underlying conditions, not the virus, were to blame for deaths, he said.

The official death toll in the country of 9.5 million is more than 200.

Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, mocked Russia for imposing lockdown restrictions. Photo / AP

Belarus recorded 45,981 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of the end of last week, nearly twice as many as in neighbouring Ukraine which has four times the population and where officials have only just started to ease the lockdown restrictions. The country's true toll is thought to be far higher.

Another member of the so-called Ostrich Alliance of leaders who have denied the impact of the coronavirus is Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega. In mid-March, as the World Health Organisation urged governments to adopt social distancing, his government held a mass gathering titled "Love in the time of Covid-19". He then disappeared for a month, before reappearing to give a speech calling the outbreak "a sign from God".

Nicaraguans have been urged to keep working and distancing measures have not been enacted. As deaths have mounted, officials have resorted to "express burials" of victims in the middle of the night to hide the extent of the losses.

Such disastrous responses have not been limited to obscure dictatorships.

Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, has consistently downplayed the virus as a "little flu" and opposed lockdowns.

The hot-headed, hard-right former army officer has doubled down even as his country has become the new epicentre of the pandemic.

With the death toll recently nudging 1500 a day, and the overall tally well over 30,000 he recently tried to reassure Brazilians death is everyone's destiny.

The world has also seen the President of the United States respond by flip-flopping on whether the virus was a threat, before pushing an unproven cure as a game-changing wonder drug. Donald Trump has also played up conspiracy theories the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory, even after his intelligence officials have said they have little evidence of that.

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro consistently downplayed the virus as a "little flu" - now the country is the epicentre of the pandemic. Photo / AP

He first downplayed the impact, in February saying it would "maybe go away".

"We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows," he said. He predicted it was "going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle – it will disappear."

Instead of disappearing, the virus tore through New York, propelling the country to nearly 110,000 deaths as of this week. As cases grew, he changed tack, accusing China of instigating a global pandemic, and pulling out of a World Health Organisation he said was beholden to Beijing.

He has also enthusiastically pushed Hydroxychloroquine, used for decades as a medication to treat malaria and lupus, as a treatment, despite a lack of evidence it is effective.

Surveying different responses to the pandemic has led some to conclude illiberal, authoritarian governments have come up with the most bizarre responses or been more likely to fail to act.

Yet a close look at links between how countries have acted and how they are governed is less clear cut, says Thomas Hale, of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government. He and other researchers have looked at the Covid-19 policies of dozens of countries.

"Even though there's a number of interesting exceptions as you have mentioned, for every exception there's kind of the opposite counter example," he told the Telegraph.

"So amongst the populist authoritarians, you see quite different responses by Modi [in India], Duterte [in the Philippines] and Orban [in Hungary]. There doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule."

Likewise, comparing democracies with dictatorships did not necessarily provide a pattern, he said.

"There's plenty of democracies that did very well and plenty of autocracies that did very badly and vice versa. So we don't see a dramatic effect there," he said.

With months if not years of the pandemic left to run, clearer patterns between governance style and response could still emerge.