When I say good governance, I’m comparing to the US as a whole. I agree that many countries did better with the pandemic. Comparing a state to a country, though, is kind of silly when the country can shut its borders but the state cannot. Additionally, you’ve picked two island countries to compare to, which have additional advantages in securing their borders.
Still, within the US Massachusetts has one of the highest death rates. The other similar states are NY, NJ, and CT, and these deaths primarily came from poor control of the outbreak at the very beginning. My understanding is that this was primarily a failing at the national level, where the US had incredibly limited testing capacity due to a combination of poor choices at the CDC and counterproductive pressure from the White House. The coronavirus got ahead of us, and the whole Northeast corridor was pretty hard hit. Where I am giving the Boston area credit, and especially Cambridge/Somerville, is in the level of local response. The state and these municipalities weren’t going to be able to fix the testing problem and it took longer than I would have liked for them to realize that the CDC was not going to be filling it’s role, but once they did their response was very good.
Okay, a few months later, and I was wrong. I do think we have decent governance, but our handling of the pandemic has been crummy even in situations where we should have been able to do better.
When I say good governance, I’m comparing to the US as a whole. I agree that many countries did better with the pandemic. Comparing a state to a country, though, is kind of silly when the country can shut its borders but the state cannot. Additionally, you’ve picked two island countries to compare to, which have additional advantages in securing their borders.
Still, within the US Massachusetts has one of the highest death rates. The other similar states are NY, NJ, and CT, and these deaths primarily came from poor control of the outbreak at the very beginning. My understanding is that this was primarily a failing at the national level, where the US had incredibly limited testing capacity due to a combination of poor choices at the CDC and counterproductive pressure from the White House. The coronavirus got ahead of us, and the whole Northeast corridor was pretty hard hit. Where I am giving the Boston area credit, and especially Cambridge/Somerville, is in the level of local response. The state and these municipalities weren’t going to be able to fix the testing problem and it took longer than I would have liked for them to realize that the CDC was not going to be filling it’s role, but once they did their response was very good.
Okay, a few months later, and I was wrong. I do think we have decent governance, but our handling of the pandemic has been crummy even in situations where we should have been able to do better.