02-13-2021, 09:35 PM
(02-13-2021, 08:08 PM)Rynn Wrote: I think it also shows how technology is useless without the social institutions to back it up. In various countries tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people have died who didn't need to. Millions of people have lost loved ones in spite of the technology being there to keep them alive. South Korea doesn't have any better technology than Italy, France, the UK, or the US. Yet its excellent track-and-trace and mass testing system meant that it was able to keep deaths low and avoid lock downs.
There's also the worrying problem that our increased communication technology and infrastructure has massively increased the ability of misinformation to spread, as well as allowing for the mass collection of data that makes creating targeted misinformation easier. I have a hard time imagining that in the 90s so many people would have thought that the virus was a hoax, and anti-vaxx groups were nowhere near as large.
What should happen is a full inquiry of everything that went wrong, everything that could have been better, and a thorough comparison of why countries that had all the means to avoid such high death counts failed to do so.
Good points. IMHO the reason for the difference is that South Korea is far more used to authoritarianism, and far more tolerant of it, than is the UK for example. It's also much more uniform in ethnicity and culture. Quite simply, if anything like the compulsory mass testing and track-and-trace used in Korea had been tried in the UK a significant proportion of the population would have refused or evaded it in some way.
The problem in the US was caused right at the top. America has serious problems, as evidenced by the choice of candidates in the 2016 election. The choice was appalling; between a reality-show host with no grip on most of the issues, and a shrieking harridan who thinks most of the electorate were "a basket of deplorables", to say nothing of her alleged criminality.
I thought at the time that, of the choices, America chose the least bad option. Now, I'm not so sure.
Regarding the UK, the politicians were of course distracted by Brexit. An issue that should have been done and dusted eighteen months before, and the politicians messed that one up too.