A young person in the city where the novel coronavirus was first discovered reflects on how the government's response has forever changed her.
www.npr.org
I read the eloquent essay - but isn't this an illiusion? That things would have been different in a democracy and they'd have listened to the wistleblower and reacted? Is that borne out by what is happening now? People are stupid and people are slow to react to things. In a diverse economy where people have free choices about where to go when sick, I do wonder if we would have reacted any more quickly to the emergence of a new flu strain or disease. How long would it have taken for the authorities to realise it had emerged, and would they have acted to contain it - will they? The evidence doesn't seem very clear that they will, so will allowing it to go into the wild unchecked and not locking down cities be better or worse? Are they any less likely to chuck university students out of their dorms to quarantine people? I don't think so.
We have what passes for democracy in the UK, but they haven't handled the virus outbreak with much commonsense. People have arrived back from places where the virus has spread, including Wuhan in the early days, and Italy recently, and there aren't even any posters at the airport telling people to self isolate or contact the authorities if they experience symptoms.
As the Italian microbiologist said yesterday, they were putting all their faith into testing people who self-isolated and reported symptoms, but not looking to trace those who arrived to impress on them that they needed to self isolate, or testing people who were presenting at hospitals with symptoms. Once they began testing those people they realized the extent of the infection was far more widespread in Italy than they had believed, and I think that's going to be the same in the US and UK too. Here, in some cases people were self-reporting - or trying to - that they had arrived back from Wuhan, but the authorities were only beginning traces once someone was symptomatic and tested. That seemed like a lost opportunity.
We are faced with a society where the people in charge can afford to self isolate for a few years without worrying about food and heat, but a large underclass of people who are self-employed, on zero hours contracts, working less than 16 hours a week or working in the black economy, can't afford to stop doing what they do to keep alive. This includes nearly all illegal workers.
It seems that the government is starting to wake up to the fact that this is going to affect us all, and despite the fact that they are developing plans, we all know that those require the co-operation of the general public, and it requires that they can afford to conform to the plan. Lots of people can't. As has been pointed out, even employed people who are on minimum wage can't afford to, either. Statutory sick pay isn't going to pay the bills.
I don't see our government solving these problems at a speed quick enough to avoid the widespread pandemic that is feared, but they may be forced eventually to do all of the things that China has been forced to do... and I don't see the different systems in force in the countries making a huge positive difference for the speed at which the virus spreads. In fact, democracy may be more of a handicap than an asset when you want to take draconian measures, and it's anyone's guess whether our governments have the balls to do the sorts of things China did to contain things.
www.itv.com
