Chapter 5 - Why the Preventive Playing Field Was Not Level

Summary

Nations went into the pandemic from different starting points, some richer and better equipped with medical infrastructure, some further from the main currents of disease transmission, others with younger and healthier populations. Such preconditions affected the tasks that governments faced, some luckier and better-prepared than others. For example, islands had certain natural advantages when it came to keeping a contagious disease out, and many of them used these to their advantage. Other areas dodged the pandemic’s initial bullets, though it is hard to say precisely why – the Buddhist triangle in South-East Asia and Eastern Europe. The sheer ability to shut down the economy for several months was expensive. Only certain nations could do so. Less wealthy ones preferred to impose drastic measures quickly, hoping to keep the disease out and thus sparing their threadbare medical infrastructure. The poorest countries were often the most drastic interveners. Demographic aspects of a country’s population also mattered: how old, how sick were its citizens? How many worked in the informal sector and were therefore hard to reach for purposes both of prevention and compensating them for lost income and wages?