Just-so storytelling about places that avoid coronavirus is proving to be an irresistible journalistic form. Here's a fawning profile of Kerala's "rock star" health minister, who sounds awesome. Kerala has had only four deaths for 35 million people. theguardian.com/world/2020/may…
But the state of Bihar, whose level of misgovernment would be comical if it weren't so damaging to people's lives, the death toll out of 99 million people stands at seven. thewire.in/politics/bihar….
Here's an article chastising the west for underestimating the hardy people of Thailand, even as the author admits the unusually low case load in the Mekong region is a mystery. asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/covid…
Here's a victory lap for Slovakia(!), the new model state in Europe for fighting coronavirus, with 24 deaths out of 5.4M people. I've seen articles that talk straight-faced about Eastern Europe's history of suffering making the population more resilient. foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/06/slo…
Meanwhile, the dictator in Belarus has all but pointed the plane at the ground, figuratively speaking, adopting policies that seem insane in the context of a pandemic. Yet the country has 121 dead out of 9 million. (Compare Belgium, 8.9k dead out of 11M) foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/08/bel…
In Somalia, not the best-governed country in the world, there have been 53 covid deaths. The pattern in Sub-Saharan Africa is the same. The general journalistic response is to insist that there are thousands of dead who don't make it into the statistics. theguardian.com/world/2020/may…
Maybe that's so—I leave it to more expert opinion than mine. But I think the current journalistic mode of singling out countries that have done well, and then finding justifications in their policy decisions to explain that success, speaks to a lack of imagination and curiosity
I will say that if you argue that there are thousands, or tens of thousands, of unreported deaths in a place because to say otherwise doesn't fit your model of this disease, the burden is on *you* to prove it. The virus has not been very good about spreading like it's supposed to
(Sorry, messed up this thread and left out the example of Thailand)
(Fixing thread)
Some more just-so storytelling, this time from the New Yorker. All the nations of sub-saharan Africa, where well-understood epidemics like malaria still run rampant, outdid Western governments on containing coronavirus, but we refuse to give them credit. newyorker.com/news/news-desk… 
The article singles out Ethiopia for a laudable contact tracing program in Addis Ababa. But Ethiopia is also one of the last nations on earth with guinea worm—a parasite close to being eradicated. That tells you about the resources for public health there. outbreaknewstoday.com/guinea-worm-di…
I am fully ready to believe that any one of the poorest countries in the world did a better job on public health than, say, northern Italy. But to argue that they *all* did, for the first time ever, defies all reason. It's more of our own wishful thinking projected onto the poor
