“Western invulnerability was a myth, of course, but what the pandemic revealed was much worse than just average levels of susceptibility and weakness. It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most.” (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
“This fact, though not unknown, is probably the most salient and profound feature of what has been a tremendously uneven pandemic with the world’s longtime ‘winners’ becoming by far its biggest losers.”
“For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a story in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world.”
“That arrogance has made the coronavirus not just a staggering but an ironic plague.”
“For nearly the entire year, the COVID epicenter was not in China, where the pathogen originated, or in corners of South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, where limited state capacity and medical infrastructure seemed, at the outset, especially concerning,...”
“...but either in Europe or the United States — places that were rated just one year ago the best prepared in the world to combat infectious disease.”
“The gold-standard responses were those in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia—countries that saw clearly the gravest infection threat the world had encountered in a century and endeavored to simply eradicate it within their borders.”
“Mostly, they succeeded. No nation in what was once grandly called ‘the West’ even really bothered to try.” (X/x)
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