Thread by @R_H_Ebright

How the West Lost COVID

How did so many rich, but sociopath-led, countries get it so wrong? How did others get it so right?
nymag.com/intelligencer/…

"[T]he UK was consumed with Brexit..The US had Trump..As the pandemic progressed, both [sociopath-led] countries flipped from denial to capitulation, choosing to treat almost any caseload plateau as an opportunity to relax, no matter how high..ongoing spread it represented."

"For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a [lie] 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..a staggering..plague..It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most. Gave up most easily, too"

"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..in Europe or the US"

The gold-standard responses were..in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia—countries that saw..the..threat..and endeavored to simply eradicate it..[T]hey succeeded..[No] nation in what was once..called 'the West' even..bothered to try."

"In Europe, North America, and South America: nearly universal failure..In East Asia, South-East Asia and Oceania: inarguable success."

"[T]he successful national campaigns resemble each other in the speed and intensity of response, and all of the failures share a similar reluctance to move preemptively—instead needing to be forced into action by the disease."

"Either you control this early on, in which case the trade-offs are..manageable.., or you don’t and you end up in a space which..no advanced polity’s decision-making process is..good at coping with. And so then it’s really a matter of degrees of failure across the board."

"An early, globally coordinated pause on travel, the virologist Florian Krammer says, would have likely averted catastrophe"