Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
The US and UK aren't alone in being flat-faced, of the top 20 countries in that survey, only 4 can be said to have met its expectations - Australia, Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia. Note: they are members of the WHO West Pacific region, as are some of the countries that exceeded expectations, e.g New Zealand and Vietnam. China is a member of the same region.
Is it possible that the information provided to the NTI survey, presumably by respective bureaucracies, was wilfully or blissfully inaccurate? One assumes the politicians would have been advised by the same bureaucracies.
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I'm not surprised so many countries shanked their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the US we have to go back a century to the Spanish Flu pandemic near the end of World War I to find a major pandemic. We went through the polio era of course, but that wasn't really a pandemic as such, and it played out over several decades. Keeping a country focused on how to properly react during a pandemic is very challenging, especially if the last major pandemic occurred over a century earlier. That of course doesn’t excuse the failure of intelligent imagination. But countries tend to put planning for such unlikely scenarios on the back burner since it cost money to be prepared. My guess is that we will be better prepared for the next pandemic if it occurs in the next decade, but if it doesn't occur for several decades we won’t be prepared. We have plenty of hurricanes, forest fires, tornado outbreaks, floods, earthquakes, et cetera on a fairly regular basis, so we stay prepared for our responses to them. But if a pandemic of this magnitude only occurs once every quarter century or longer, we will forget to be prepared for it. Unfortunately that seems to be human nature.
In the US we did have a flu pandemic scare a decade or so ago, and they were not prepared for it. They set up some preparations for that in the future, however by the time COVID-19 arrived we had already allowed our medical supply depots to be woefully depleted and/or stocked with expired supplies. That was a huge set back when COVID-19 came around. And of course we had the politicians who ran the country telling us don’t worry this isn’t that bad, we will be just fine. Once they did start responding, it turned into more of a pep rally event than a real pandemic response. So we, and other countries too, failed in our lack of maintaining proper levels of preparedness, and we failed in accepting the pandemic as a real and deadly threat until it was nearly too late to have a successful response.