2019 Global Health Security Index: Countries Ranked by Preparedness for Pandemic
ghsindex.org
ghsindex.org
This ranking was made a year before an actual pandemic and they had more misses than hits, and understanding why may help with other predictions about the future. At least the ones involving human actions.
Same with the UK: the response from their scientific community has been absolutely fantastic. But when Boris Johnson simply didn't want to lock down and couldn't make up his mind until too late that didn't count for much. Also he fucked up the test-trace-isolate system for ideological reasons.
Sweden + Denmark were rated as more prepared than Norway, which could well be true, but Sweden chose the UK approach (for no sane reason) and has paid the price.
In all of these cases the problem is not lack of ability to handle the pandemic, but a political lack of will to do it.
The death tolls in the USA and to a lesser extent Canada, the UK, Italy, and Spain were an unwillingness on the part of some of the population to act on the pandemic. They wouldn't social distance. They wouldn't put on masks. They wouldn't stop travelling. And the governments were unwilling or unable to force them to do so.
On the one hand, I entirely believe that their state has the reach and support to quarantine entire regions and crush the pandemic by force.
On the other hand, nominally Marxist countries with massive bureaucracies and being honest about death tolls go together like shit and strawberry shortcake.
I’m still probably erring on the side of China getting it right though. The Soviets barely managed to cover up Chernobyl for a few days and this is a much more visible event.
This is a different culture from the West where people are expected only to protect themselves but there is no expectation for others to protect you.
Lockdowns only seem to be effective when coupled with efficient testing, tracing, isolating and the use of face masks. At the moment the Delta strain is challenging this idea though. Cases here are plateauing or rising slowly and we are lockdown.
Culturally there is more emphasis on the individual in western cultures vs the collective in eastern cultures. Perhaps due to historical religious differences. This clearly has an effect on things like mask wearing, self isolation, coming forward for testing and complying with lockdowns.
While Australians generally aren’t as community minded as those in Asian countries they aren’t as individualistic as those in say the USA. This is clearly evidenced in the average Australians view towards gun control for instance.
Lockdowns work well, Sydney was just too slow to act. Look at any epidemiological model and it pretty clear new cases will be emerging for a while yet. The real solution is the vaccine of course.
But the point is that in both the long Melbourne and now Sydney lockdowns the majority of the population has been pretty happy with the approach.
In both cases there were protests, but in both cases there were equal numbers asking for the government to lock down earlier than it did.
Death tolls in China were covered up according to citizen media. There were reports of crematoriums running at full capacity in Wuhan in January 2020. It’s hard for people to die of covid if they haven’t even been tested.
Before Wuhan locked down and covid tests became a thing face masks became mandatory in public. Police would arrest people who refused to wear a mask. They were temperature checking people in their homes and in public and quarantining them in camps too. They didn’t have an issue with PPE because they soaked up supplies even going so far as to request citizens in other countries to buy up local supply.
While all their efforts have appeared to be effective their vaccine hasn’t been shown to be as effective as the alternatives so there is still a chance for things to go wrong though.
They had both the will and the ability. The west only had the ability unless you want to count Australia and NZ.
They weren't honest about the death toll, and came close to fucking things up because of that, but once Beijing decided to be serious about stopping it they did stop it.
We know from outside reporting that they handled it, so there's nothing to guess about there.
But they did go full authoritarian on their own people... I remember reading in the very early days there were accounts of the state police WELDING people into their apartments in Wuhan to stop them going out for food etc.
Scary stuff. I wonder how those people feel about those actions now, over a year later and 600k+ deaths in the US.
(food delivery through openings)
I did see some site unrelated reports that the gov were organizing deliveries. I would hope they were not letting those that they felt the need to "jail" in their own homes, starve to death...
I mean Laos seemed to be doing really well last year but they weren’t testing much so not many cases! Success!
China is complex. We underestimated their totalitarianism but they also had solid science which we ignored, reporters on CNN were happy to contradict China's head of health. China got the genome online when the death toll was one. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN908947.1 That seems fast to me.
The report is missing the media. They seem to have been the most destructive force during the pandemic.
Only recently Europe has overtaken the USA on vaccines uptake -
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
All the vaccines in the world are useless if the people won't take them. Stockpiles of masks are useless if people won't use them.
be interesting to run the numbers again given the last year and a half...