Corona-zona

Today's post is by Corona-zona Senior Europe Correspondent Maria Iovine  There’s a German expression, sicher ist sicher —safe is safe, or it’s better to be on the safe side. But in a pandemic, is it really? What is the cost of clinging to that worldview assumption? A recent story in the New York Times concludes that European institutions are risk avoidant and hold to the strategy of choosing caution when risks cannot be clearly defined. By contrast, the same article describes U.S. dealings with drug makers by saying “[t]he United States made the negotiations easy — its critics say far too easy.” And there you have it, the cultural dimension known as uncertainty avoidance . Germany high, United States low. Beneath the NYT’s analysis lies this phenomenon. It’s fair to say both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. But this post is about how the inflexibility, unwillingness, or inability to shift a tightly-held worldview assumption, to “err on the side of caution,” ...

 I'm a little pressed for time today, so in place of a regular post I recommend, for your reading enjoyment, an excellent essay from New York Magazine. It's entitled How the West Lost COVID . It's lengthy, but well done and well worth the read.  It asks the question, why did The U.S. and Europe fare so badly while countries in Asia, Oceana, and Africa got and kept the pandemic under control? I won't give any spoilers. But it has a lot to do with a feckless political culture in the West, and it offers some potential lessons learned for next time. Image by  Gerhard G.  from  Pixabay  

  Last night's PBS Newshour had a segment containing an interview with Dr. Paul Farmer .  He's co-founder of Partners in Health , an organization focused on bringing "the benefits of modern medical science to those most in need."  He and his organization have been involved in Ebola epidemics in Africa. In this segment he compares and contrasts the response to Ebola in Africa and the response to SARS-CoV-2 here in the United States.   Among other things, he says here we have "failed differently" due to "containment nihilism, in other words, a refusal to do contact tracing, to invest adequately in public health responses." The six-minute segment is worth a watch (or a read of the transcript, if you prefer). Image by  bhossfeld  from  Pixabay