Tautological thinking about which countries the virus spared remains universal even seven months into this disaster. If you were hit hard, it's your fault, and if you weren't, it's because you did a great job, or weren't excessively proud, or had a woman in charge, etc.
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The bottom two stripes on this map represent two billion people and something like eighty countries, at every economic level and ranging from model state to failed state. Every one of them did better in the pandemic than western Europe. Were they all less proud?pic.twitter.com/rVMK3j4EeF
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The fact that some places do well for a long time and then blow up (like Brazil) just makes it all more puzzling. But we're long past the point where the original explanation, that cases and deaths are lagging, or are just not being reported, is adequate. And still we moralize
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None of this means you can't harshly criticize governments and public health authorities when they fail to do their jobs. The experience of the countries that were hit hard early is that certain countermeasures worked well, and there was no excuse for not adopting them quickly.
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What rankles me is the continuing insistence to assign moral blame to the hard hit, and praise to the spared, when randomness and unknown factors are also clearly in play. The morality play blinds us to evidence and robs us of epistemic humility we need to defeat this illness
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End of conversation
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but but but muh narrative
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