Pretty good governance, as illustrated by the pandemic response.
[edit] Really? Third worst state for deaths (all expressed per million population) in the US. If MA were a country it would have the worst death rate.
Compare MA (1,391 deaths per million) to Taiwan (0.3 deaths per million, none for months) with no lockdown. MA is 4,000 times worse. “Good” is not a word that has any applicability here. I would suggest “disastrous” or “catastrophic” would be more apt. Even Australia at 35 is 40 times better than MA.
I notice a lot of places are delusional about their ‘great’ covid response.
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.
Many of the factors affecting number of deaths are beyond a place’s control, such as how early on the pandemic spread to that place, and how densely populated the city is. I don’t have a strong opinion about MA but measuring by deaths per capita isn’t a good way of judging the response.
[edit]
Really?
Third worst state for deaths (all expressed per million population) in the US.
If MA were a country it would have the worst death rate.
Compare MA (1,391 deaths per million) to Taiwan (0.3 deaths per million, none for months) with no lockdown. MA is 4,000 times worse. “Good” is not a word that has any applicability here. I would suggest “disastrous” or “catastrophic” would be more apt. Even Australia at 35 is 40 times better than MA.
I notice a lot of places are delusional about their ‘great’ covid response.
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.
Many of the factors affecting number of deaths are beyond a place’s control, such as how early on the pandemic spread to that place, and how densely populated the city is. I don’t have a strong opinion about MA but measuring by deaths per capita isn’t a good way of judging the response.