TheEconomistSeptember 5th 2020 491F
or karina celisand her fiancé James,
covid-19 could not have come at a worse
time. The couple planned to marry in May
and to move from London to Salisbury, a
small English city whose cathedral im-
presses Russian tourists. In July they had a
baby, their first. The wedding has been
postponed indefinitely. Moving house dur-
ing lockdown was surprisingly straightfor-
ward. But having the child proved a night-
mare of bureaucracy.
In Britain pregnant women are often
given a paper folder containing their medi-
cal records, which they must haul to their
appointments. Ms Celis’s notes were not
transferred properly from her hospital in
London to a new one in Salisbury. She had
to start a new folder—and to repeat all her
appointments. Absurdly she and her fiancé
had to listen again to an hour-long talk
about what to do when expecting a baby.
For Ms Celis, a software-engineering
manager, the lack of digitisation was
shocking. “At almost every appointment I
have been to, either in London or here, the
staff mentioned their struggles with tech,”she says. Some maternity services have
moved online, but mostly health care in
Britain, as elsewhere, has stubbornly re-
sisted digitisation. The National Health
Service (nhs) remains among the world’s
biggest purchasers of fax machines. A plan
to create a unified digital system of pa-
tients’ records was abandoned almost a de-
cade ago, after £10bn ($12.5bn) was spent on
it. No further attempts have been made.
Neither health care nor Britain is un-
ique in relying heavily on paper. By pre-
venting face-to-face meetings and closing
the offices where bureaucrats shuffle docu-
ments, the pandemic has revealed how big
a problem that is. In many countries, it has
been impossible to get a court hearing, a
passport or get married while locked down,
since they all still require face-to-face
interactions. Registering a business has
been slower or impossible. Elections are a
worrying prospect.
Governments that have long invested in
digitising their systems endured less dis-
ruption. Those that have not are discover-
ing how useful it would be if a lot more offi-cial business took place online.
Covid-19 has brought many aspects of
bureaucratic life to a halt. In England at
least 73,400 weddings had to be delayed—
not just the ceremony, also the legal part—
reckons the Office for National Statistics.
In France courts closed in March for all but
essential services, and did not reopen until
late May. They are still not operating at full
capacity. Most countries have extended
visas for foreigners trapped by the pan-
demic, but consular services stopped al-
most everywhere, meaning that people liv-
ing abroad could not renew passports or
register births. In America green-card ap-
plications were halted in April; they re-
started in June. In Britain appointments to
take biometric details of people applying
for permanent residency ceased in March
and resumed only partly in June.
Some applications cannot be delayed.
As Florida was locking down, huge queues
formed outside government offices to get
the paper forms needed to sign up for un-
employment insurance. In theory the state
has a digital system, but it was so poorly
constructed that many could not access it.
At the start of the pandemic the website
crashed for days. Even several months later
people trying to apply had to join a digital
queue and wait for hours before being able
to log in. When government offices in
Montgomery, the capital of neighbouring
Alabama, reopened, people camped out-
side, hoping to see an official who might
help with their claims.The digitisation of governmentPaper travails
Covid-19 has accelerated the adoption of online government services for
everything from welfare to weddingsInternational