Impact of COVID-19 on the comparative practice of federalism: Some preliminary observations

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented international event. The spread of the coronavirus – the biggest public health crisis in a century and the first of this scale in the globalized modern world – has prompted unparalleled responses by national governments. The proliferation of 24-hours news coverage and social media has allowed people across the world to follow, in real time, the unfolding and visible impacts of the pandemic. In 2020, as governments grappled with fluctuating waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, the effectiveness of public policy varied among federal nations (the paper focuses on countries that are explicitly and constitutionally federal, and countries with governance systems in which governance powers and responsibilities are devolved from the central level to the subnational level). Federal countries such as Australia and Canada managed to keep mortality low, whereas others such as Brazil, Spain and the United States suffered some of the highest numbers of fatalities anywhere around world, both in absolute and relative terms (Kontis et al. 2020, 1919-1928; Brunner et al. 2020; Ritchie et al. 2020)