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Trump gets most of the attention, but this whole pandemic has laid plain how liberal republics have been hollowed out by neoliberalism over the past few decades. The capability for broad, fast, collective action has been all-but wiped out, even in the supposedly enlightened and well-run countries of Western Europe. The nations that defeated fascism are crippled by a far weaker threat.

I can't think of another liberal democracy besides NZ that has handled COVID well, and they are a small island country. It's embarrassing, because the response has been terrible on both purely financial and humanitarian levels.

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The problem is that the definition of "handling COVID well" that everyone seems to expect is stopping it in its tracks and wiping it out, and doing that with a respiratory disease that's this infectious and has such mild symptoms for so many people falls outside the scope of what traditional pandemic planning in Western countries even tries to achieve. Bluntly, no-one knows how to do it. As far as I can tell, the conventional wisdom used to be that it's just not possible. New Zealand has some fundamental advantages that put it in a better position to achieve this than anyone else (island, long way from other countries, relatively low population) but even they're having a bit of a time sustaining it.

Now, you're probably right that a few decades ago the response to something like Covid wouldn't be seen as such a disaster - but that's mostly because expectations were different back then. If you take a look at some of the flu pandemics, they were a mess in terms of things like school closures and other measures, but as far as I can tell this was just seen as normal and inevitable.

(Obviously, countries which had bad experiences with SARS do have very different pandemic planning - but SARS was a much better candidate for cotainment and elimination than Covid is.)

I wonder if mask wearing is the biggest factor and more generally, willingness to comply with restrictions due to experiencing SARS.

Japan's politicans are no less incompetent than other 1st world countries and geographically they should be much worse off but their cases are way down compared to other places.

I'm not sure Japan had a geographical disadvantage. Generally speaking, the closer countries were to Italy the worse they seemed to do at least at first, and Japan is a long way from Italy.

The physical-proximity model has a problem with Italy’s distance from China.

There were workers in the Italian fashion industry who came straight from Wuhan. That was the whole reason they had a step-function for initial infection.

Precisely - physical distance is not a relevant measure.

You're right that what actually matters is the number of people travelling between countries - social, rather than physical, geography - but for the most part actual physical distance from Italy seemed to be a good approximation of that, maybe with the exception of the UK and New York.

The reason why Italy was the epicenter is a bit of a mystery though. There's hints they screwed up their Covid testing and managed, pretty much uniquely among Western countries, to not actually test people hospitalized with potential symptoms who didn't have links to travellers from China, meaning that they only detected community spread when someone who did happen to have contact with someone who travelled from there caught it from someone else. But there doesn't seem to be much coverage of this at least in English-language media; everyone's focused on arguing that their country did worse than Italy because Italy was caught by suprise, whereas everyone else had them as a warning, without examining how they ended up getting caught by surprise. It's also not a full explanation. Possibly it just came down to random chance.

There are more than a few entire factories run by Chinese and staffed by Chinese in Italy. That's your answer.

The official case numbers in Japan probably drastically undercount the number of infections due to limited testing. A recent antibody seroprevalence study found 46% positive. It wasn't a truly random sample but had a large study population from multiple locations. If mask wearing is such a big factor than how did so many people get infected?

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v...

Because Japan's population is so elderly, any severe undercount of infections would show up as very large excess mortality, but that hasn't been observed.

Then how do you explain the study results linked above?

Australia.

After a (relatively) small second wave spike in one of the states (Victoria) which is now under control, there are very few cases of community transmission.

It’s the result of a combination of: controlled island borders, unpopular but effective internal hard borders between some states, mandatory managed hotel quarantine for inbound passengers, well-executed contact tracing by health departments, broad access to PCR testing now returning results usually within 12-24 hours, and a population that’s been surprising willing to “take one for the team” and go into lockdowns and wear masks when needed.

> which is now under control

Famous last words. See e.g. France.

Was it claimed that it was under control in France? (it might have been said in the media, but I've mostly stopped following the news)

No, never really. What blows my mind is that the French haven't mandated work from home for all office-workers, even with the number of cases they are seeing.

Essentially, the EU (in general) had a terrible first wave, and then said well we need the summer for our economies, and now we are paying the price for that.

Except for Sweden, which pre-paid.

I see you're getting replies that (correctly) claim there are other states that handled it well. But those are exceptions to the rule of "western societies didn't and don't handle the pandemic very gracefully."

Mind you, I am not advocating to follow an authoritarian/Chinese model.

But the analysis that neoliberalism (and the hyper-individualist mentality that it co-evolved with) have undermined any collective effort at containing this effectively seems valid to me, or at least worthy of discussion.

Financially, we have eroded our capability to respond to this in a timely manner. Our healthcare and test/trace capabilities were simply not up to snuff, even though the people that know most about them kept sounding the alarms.

Philosophically (and IMHO this is the more contestable part of my opinion) our individualist societies have eroded our capability to demand (let alone volunteer!) personal sacrifice for a collective good, even one that indirectly benefits us and our direct peers.

Alas, give the developments and debate around this, I don't see anyone working through this after the fact. We'll all want to move on, forget that 2020 ever existed, and hope that economic growth will lead us into the golden twenties we've all been waiting for.

This time it will definitely work and not screw us all over in the next cycle, we'll say. Or at least next time I will be on the winning side! Just you wait!

Japan and Canada seem to have done relatively well, as have the Nordic countries (perhaps with the exception of Sweden which is TBD). The Baltic nations have done reasonably well too. Looking outside of Europe and the OECD, African democracies like Rawanda have kept the virus in check without draconian measures.

Having good or at least recently tested public health infrastructure and lucking into a good head of state/governing coalition seems to be key.

Japan/Korea are not as liberal as US/western europe though. And danemark/norway/sweden/finland or the baltic countries in general are more socialist that enven France, really.

The Nordics are social democracies. Free market, liberal with a strong emphasis on social care. I'm not quite sure what your point is.

Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Estonia all rank higher in economic freedom than the US and have more direct democracies. The US literally wrote Japan's constitution. France stands out as having the most powerful executive branch of any of these countries.

That the US 'wrote' Japanese constitution is a technical artifact.

99% of their culture is not based on the cultural vestiges as we articulate then 'in law'.

They technically have some institutions which mirror 'Western Liberal Democracy' but they are not remotely like Western nations in that sense.

Taiwan, Singapore are also technically a lot like 'Western Liberal Democracies' but we can see they absolutely are not, right there in their COVID responses.

They are indeed noteworthily 'different'.

I think that's misses my point a bit. What I'm trying to say is that Japan has strong protection for freedom of speech, assembly, and general civil liberties especially as compared to Singapore. I don't know very much about Taiwan. While culturally quite different, Japan has a fairly familiar government from a western perspective, and civic life that seem roughly comparable(IMHO).

> Canada seem to have done relatively well

Strangely, although Canada was much better prepared (from SARS-1 in 2003) than the USA (CDC fiasco) and their politicians listened to "science", they haven't done as well as expected.

Their death rate is half that of the USA so far, but that's still almost 10,000 dead for a population of 37 million, vs. 200,000 dead for US population of 320 million.

Some of the spread and deaths were from farm labor continuing to cross the border from Mexico to Ontario during the lockdown.

> they haven't done as well as expected

I think there are some elements of luck, demographics, and geography here.

Iceland has done relatively well from what I've read.

Iceland is a remote island of 300k people with very low density. Giving it as an example is disingenuous.

Good point regarding population density.

I don't see the case for calling the GP disingenuous though.

But most of the population is concentrated in a rather small area, which national-level population density statics don't capture.

Notably, and obviously, all 3 examples mentioned in this thread are islands (NZ, Aus, and Iceland). That seems like more than coincidence.

The ability to limit spread by controlling your border has been a factor, and that’s certainly easier for island nations.

But it’s not the only factor: well-managed healthcare systems, clear government policy and action, and public support for controls are also important.

e.g.

- Vietnam: landlocked, populous, excellent internal response: just over 1000 cases and 35 deaths; approx. 60 active cases currently

- UK + Ireland: quite frankly a bit of a mess

*Vietnam not landlocked; but in the middle of a very populous region

> - UK + Ireland: quite frankly a bit of a mess

That is mostly true. However, I would note that Ireland were kinda screwed in some respects by the border with Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK and thus has the incredibly poor response of England and the Tories. We've definitely made a bunch of mistakes, but it would have been a lot easier to deal with Covid were it not for the border (and our vast under-investment in our health service over the last 20-30 years).

It's worth noting that the UK cases are far worse than they seem, as uniquely amongst European nations, they only test symptomatic people, even though we know that asymptomatic spread is a big problem with Covid.

Thailand.

Population 70 million.

Total cases 3,743

Deaths 59

In the US, that “the capability for broad, fast, collective action has been all-but wiped out” is not a consequence of liberalism, neo- or otherwise, but of a deliberate strategy of those most vehemently opposed to it in any form (real or imagined.)

China and their neighbors already had multiple threats of pandemics.

It's quite unknown for countries far away from them, ironically US was pretty good prepared before Trump.

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