nameandnature

Here’s What The UK Government Was Told By Scientists, Said In Public, And Did On The Big Coronavirus Issues: “Much of the evidence to the government has been made public, and it means we have a level of insight into where the government’s words and decisions, and the advice from the experts, come together — and diverge.These timelines explore five of the biggest issues: mass events, social distancing, school closures, isolation, and testing.”
Via the ever-interesting tomchivers

(tags: pandemic uk sage government covid19 science)
The problem with our response to Covid-19 wasn’t that we didn’t have a plan – it was the opposite: “People make plans, but plans exert power over people. Covid-19 is not a flu virus but something new for which we don’t yet have effective medications, and it is more infectious than Sars and Mers, the other two coronaviruses to have emerged since the turn of the century. Faced with the novel problem of an untreatable, highly transmissible virus, the government’s current advisers seem to have found it hard to break with the plan they had – now unfit for purpose – and think anew.”

(tags: covid19 uk politics influenza flu)
Fatal exceptionalism and lack of humility to learn from the Asian example: “Covid-19, or how the West was undone by its assertion of civilizational difference bordering on provincial narcissism”

(tags: covid19 korea china politics epidemic)