One thing Covid-19 has done is allow us to rank a lot of governments by competence. There’s a lot of governments in the running for most incompetent. The UK and the US are up there, and if Sweden’s experiment doesn’t work, they may take the crown.
Probably the most competent government in the world is Vietnam. They managed to keep deaths to zero despite being right next to China and having massive economic ties. They jumped right on top of it, tested, traced, isolated and quarantined. They made sure people isolating had food (heck, they installed rich machines which gave rice for free).
This tracks what I’ve heard from ex-pats: Vietnam is a country where things get done, and that its cities are among the most dynamic in the world. Vietnam still has the sense that there’s a task, and you don’t put profit before that task. So they are able to build infrastructure and complete goals with stunning rapidity and minimal, by our standards, waste.
Was a time, of course, when the UK was like that (in the mid to 19th century British efficiency was often commented upon). Not so long ago Japan was like this, but they’ve lost it at the top, though the rot hasn’t gone all the way through the entire society yet.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, New Zealand and Australia have performed well. Canada’s performance, while good compared to the UK and the US (not even faint praise), was delayed. I was somewhat surprised by Australia’s performance, but I guess they can still be competent when it doesn’t touch on their corrupt resource extraction industry, as was the case during the wildfires (which is, in itself, interesting information).
The keys to good performance were acting early, testing and tracing contacts, and doing isolation properly: Quarantine away from your family.
The key to fixing this is going to be widespread testing, contact tracing, and then proper quarantine, which means you have to support the people in quarantine and make it mandatory.
Tracing is slow work. It can take five days to trace one person’s contacts. That means, if you’ve let things get out of control, you need a large number of people. Oddly, in the US, millions of people now need work and hey, it can be done from home: It’s phone work.
So competence means ramping up testing as fast as possible. It means distributing masks to everyone, free of charge. It means tracing, tracking and quarantining.
Until these things are done, releasing restrictions after a drop in cases will just lead to another spike in a few weeks.
Truly competent governments got ahead of this: They didn’t need an army of tracers.
But those who didn’t, do.
Let us hope our governments can, at least, learn from their mistakes.
The alternative is a year and a half of waves of cases, isolation, and more waves. In the US, with its refusal to support individuals and small companies, that means widespread hunger. And, as the food system is impacted in many countries, along with logistics, there is likely to be famine in other areas (for example, India, which has very low margins).
Few readers thought they might want to live in Vietnam, I suspect.
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