Covid Resilience Ranking:The Best and Worst Places to Be as Winter Meets Omicron

bloomberg.com

7 points·robarr··2 comments

"Former Covid-Zero proponents remain lower ranked in November, with Australia 33th (sic), New Zealand at No. 36 and Singapore 37th as they slowly reopen once shuttered borders but still lag the rest of the world on reigniting travel."

It is fascinating to see such a bias throughout the media towards international travel as such a highly-valued marker for people's welfare, when for most people their income does not allow for frequent international travel anyway.

Rich people's skiing trips are not worth more than poor people's grandparents.

Australia is now (at last) getting up to very high rates of vaccination and has had incredibly low total rates of Covid infection compared to the rest of the world. It's bizarre that it's not considered a success story in comparison to the countries with hundreds of thousands of deaths. Maybe my interpretation of "resilience" differs significantly from the authors'.

In the eyes of Bloomberg the return to the good old times ‘before it all went to hell’ is the only measure of success : “ November’s No.1, the UAE has basically normalized back to pre-pandemic life: Property sales are at a decade high in its largest city of Dubai, restaurants are full, and the Expo—which is running until March—has attracted two million visitors since it started in October.”

But as much as i agree on the false equivalence of flight travel and success story, one the main characteristics of the pre-pandemic world was not only global circulation of goods but also global circulation of people. Students, scientific community members and professionals starting to travel again is, i hope, a good measure of a healing world.

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