Nations Around The World Are 'Pulling Out All The Stops' To Protect Citizens, Except In The U.S.
Daily Kos, by Mark Sumner, March 6, 2020.
On Thursday afternoon, the director-general of the World Health Organization issued a tweet expressing his concern about the “political commitment” to dealing with the coronavirus pandemic being displayed by some nations. As Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus makes clear, “This is not a drill, this is not the time to give up, this is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops.”
- Washington, D.C. residents line up outside a 'coronavirus pop-up store' that sells face masks, protective gloves and hand sanitizer.
There are countries where exactly that has happened. Singapore has conducted a campaign of radical transparency, revealing information down to the age, gender, condition, and location of every single case within the nation. Japan and China are just two of 13 nations that have closed primary and secondary schools, putting 300 million children out of classrooms for a period of weeks in hopes that the pandemic can be controlled. South Korea is not only conducting a “testing blitz” that has kept its overall death rate lower than those of other nations by identifying cases before the first symptom, but it is also taking paper money off the street for two weeks—with some bills to be destroyed.
Naturally, there are concerns in both Singapore and South Korea that the efforts to contain the epidemics in those nations are trampling on privacy rights. This seems particularly true in South Korea, where the constant stream of phone-based alerts is sometimes a little … too narrative when it comes to describing the people who have tested positive and how they acquired the virus. But the one thing that all these countries have in common is that they are taking the threat of the pandemic seriously, moving firmly, and delivering a message that shows that their governments realize the potential results of failure.
There are certainly governments out there that are not being honest. That includes Iran’s, which suppressed information about the outbreak there until long after that nation had become a hub for spreading coronavirus to over a dozen other countries. But the United States may be unique among the world’s democratic nations in its simple inability to tell its citizens what is going on.
On Tuesday, the coronavirus task force under Mike Pence announced that a million tests would be available at the end of the week. That was then amended to having the tests “in the mail” to state and local officials by the end of the week. Then a million became 75,000. And then the end of the week became next week. And then came the admission that the U.S. will not have the tests it needs over the coming weeks...
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