Corona-zona

  Today's post is by Senior Europe Correspondent  Maria Iovine In Germany there’s an expression— Wer viel misst, misst viel Mist —i f you measure a lot, you measure a lot of crap ( Mist ) . That’s something like the German version of "figures lie and liars figure."  We have been awash in a giant sea of pandemic data for longer than ever expected. News, stats, charts, graphs, you name it. It’s exhausting, even if you love numbers.  New types of stats emerge almost daily. The latest is the number of vaccinations administered…or is that produced? Or delivered but not yet administered? Shots in arms . It sounds like the new boots on the ground . But I digress.   As a US expat living in Europe, I have the double whammy of comparing the EU to the US, or Germany’s population to California’s. Trying to get to some useful vaccination numbers, I compare my German state, Baden-Württemberg, to Colorado, Virginia, or Arizona—wherever seems like home. Then there’s county l...

  I started this blog one year ago today. Well OK, there were a couple posts in December 2020, but that was a false start. Regular daily posts started on January 6, 2021. That's perhaps an inauspicious birthday because it's the same day T**** directed a treasonous mob to stage an insurrection at the Capitol. Anyway, as it says in the "about the blog," I started it because I was kind of obsessing about the  pandemic and reading all I could about it. The blog functioned as an outlet for all the information I was consuming as I was hunkering down at home, and I thought it might be of some modest help to others. One year ago, I never dreamed that I would still be blogging a year later! Like a lot of other people I was kind of naïve, thinking that with the vaccines coming the Apocalypse would be over in a few of months. Just goes to show how wrong a person can be. I've enjoyed writing all of the posts (284 including this one) I've done. This is a kind of writing ac...

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,” ...