I don’t know much how the situation is in African countries, Middle East, India or Latin America, but there are two contrasting examples—European culture countries (including USA, Canada) that struggle with the pandemic and East Asian countries that managed to get it under control. There are also Western countries that are doing well—like Iceland or New Zealand and Australia—which is kind of in between - I think they are just remote enough. The main factor seems to be how disciplined the population is. There are many measures that limit the R and in the West we fail to enforce them, be it face masks, limitations for public gatherings or giving accurate and complete information to contact tracers.
This is of course complicated by the mistakes that our authorities made—starting with discouraging masks use early in the epidemic—those failures further undermined the public trust in government actions.
We need a plan that is adopted to those circumstances. More bottom up action—to try many approaches locally and see what works and only then scale it up and maybe mandate. My pet idea is to build safe bubbles around us and especially around the most vulnerable. Most of the long and close contacts, that have the biggest probability of spreading the virus, come from our stable social network. Our family, co-workers, schoolmates, friends etc—these are people that can infect us most easily—but they are also people with whom we can negotiate rules. This strategy can be more effective than it seems. It was actually promoted back in April and May—but now we can eventually have one more tool to make it really effective—rapid tests. At home cheap tests can be a game changer here. Support https://www.rapidtests.org/
I don’t know much how the situation is in African countries, Middle East, India or Latin America, but there are two contrasting examples—European culture countries (including USA, Canada) that struggle with the pandemic and East Asian countries that managed to get it under control. There are also Western countries that are doing well—like Iceland or New Zealand and Australia—which is kind of in between - I think they are just remote enough. The main factor seems to be how disciplined the population is. There are many measures that limit the R and in the West we fail to enforce them, be it face masks, limitations for public gatherings or giving accurate and complete information to contact tracers. This is of course complicated by the mistakes that our authorities made—starting with discouraging masks use early in the epidemic—those failures further undermined the public trust in government actions.
We need a plan that is adopted to those circumstances. More bottom up action—to try many approaches locally and see what works and only then scale it up and maybe mandate. My pet idea is to build safe bubbles around us and especially around the most vulnerable. Most of the long and close contacts, that have the biggest probability of spreading the virus, come from our stable social network. Our family, co-workers, schoolmates, friends etc—these are people that can infect us most easily—but they are also people with whom we can negotiate rules. This strategy can be more effective than it seems. It was actually promoted back in April and May—but now we can eventually have one more tool to make it really effective—rapid tests. At home cheap tests can be a game changer here. Support https://www.rapidtests.org/