Old Habits Never Die
I cannot seem to let go of the biweekly update
Numbers are falling everywhere and the datasets are becoming less reliable. Both factors make interpretations and comparisons between countries harder if not impossible.
When it comes to mortality, the only true indicator left of the severity of Covid-19, countries seem to fall in two categories:
- Mortality falling (Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Mexico, Japan),
- Mortality keeping steady at a too high level (France, Denmark, Sweden) or falling only marginally (USA, Washington State, Italy, Canada).
There seems to be no obvious parameter that makes these countries exhibit similar patterns. It could be owed to the aforementioned reliability of the data, and maybe it is not important.
But when comparing the red curves below, it is apparent that mortality in the USA seems to have reached its bottom at a much higher level as France, which also does not want to go down further. Germany is very low and still falling and Tunisia is very low but climbing.
Does this mean that Covid-19 will remain more of a treat in the USA than in Germany?
When disaster is about to strike and authorities fail to order preventative measures, there will be casualties and people will become angry at the authorities. And rightfully so.
When disaster strikes and preventative measures do keep the number of casualties down, people will also be angry because the authorities had seemingly overreacted. After all, nothing bad had happened. This is probably some many of us will be thinking of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fortunately, only few people think this way but their number is growing. The reasons are manyfold but the decline of real journalism, the rise of social media (which take the place of journalism), the changes being forced upon us by our overheating planet and probably simply the pendulum swinging the other way threaten to make the next pandemic much worse (see this nice opinion piece on CNN).
This pendulum swinging the other way is nothing new. History has shown that it can take millennia to get back to the achievements from before society failed.
Take the example of the Roman Empire. It was a large standardisation body because a water pipe produced in Syria could theoretically patch a water conduit in Gaul. West Rome fell around the 4th century and the next standardisation body with Rome in its midst and covering a similarly sized area (but still falling short) is the European Union.
That was 1700 years of catching up.