Covid19: now here's interesting data...

[johnny9fingers]

www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/21/vietnam-has-reported-no-coronavirus-deaths-how/

For the TL;DR chaps, basically by being incredibly fascist about things combined with testing and compulsory quarantine and some total lockdowns of villages and towns they've kept the numbers ridiculously low.

So it appears that states which opt for a totalitarian response combined with mandatory testing (the Vietnamese testing kits cost $25 each) can limit the infection rate and death toll.

And it seems that this virus has an odd pattern in any given nation. It targets liberal capitalist democracies with entrenched freedoms more than totalitarian nations, as well as targeting BAME folk within these liberal capitalist democracies more than other folk too.

The freer a nation is, the worse its death toll will be. Mind you, Australia and New Zealand have pretty good figures too, and they are liberal capitalist democracies - just they got their responses sorted in time. Unlike the UK and US, and poor old Italy; which never stood a chance being the canary in the mine, so to speak.

It is becoming apparent that there is a correlation between lower mortality rates, and swift and severely sensible responses; and a smidgeon of totalitarianism and the odd draconian measure also seems to help.

Comments

[dewline]

Your first paragraph is definitely on-target. Ditto Health Canada back during the Harper years, from what little I know and remember. And I wonder how much damage Doug Ford was able to do as premier of Ontario specifically in his first couple of years before the Pandemic. Now, though, he seems to have had the fear of some kind of god - or, maybe, God Herself - put into him, so maybe he'll remember these months if enough of us are foolish enough to re-elect him.