Chapter II: My Country, Wrong or Right -
Individual Nations Respond to the Pandemic
I’ve spent a good deal of time outlining what happened at the start of this pandemic, how it grew from a few infected Chinese in some town nobody heard of or cared about (let’s be brutally honest) to an event of concern and finally to a worldwide panic as a danger we had never experienced in our lives (SARS? Hardly touched us. Foot and Mouth? We got through it. Bird Flu? Pah!) descended on our comfortable way of life and gleefully began ripping it apart like a pride of lions chasing gazelle across the Serengeti, or something. This was something completely new to us, which might to some extent explain why we were all so slow to react to it. I personally feel - as I felt at the time - that we were all kind of in denial. Nobody wanted to believe this was going to be as bad as it got, and so nobody did. We all adopted the equivalent position of someone sitting on the floor, hands over their ears screaming
no no no!
But we couldn’t stop it, and our denials were useless. It was coming, and we had no choice but to try to prepare ourselves as best we could to weather the storm.
In this next chapter I’m going to look at how individual countries reacted to the news. How they prepared, how they informed, or didn’t, their citizenry, what help if any they offered and how many countries basically self-isolated while others tried to assist their neighbours. The pandemic has, as I said earlier, brought both the best and the worst out of humanity, and here I’ll be looking at how that attitude was distributed across the countries of the world. As we’re pretty much only talking about the outbreak here, I won’t be cataloguing each country’s total response to the pandemic, but just the first few months, usually comprising their first lockdown (if they had any), and generally up to a half-arbitrary date of June 2020.
In the case of the USA I’ll be doing it by state, as some states never did anything about the virus, while others locked down. Some, such as Texas and Florida, actually made the situation worse by legislating against mask and vaccine mandates, and encouraging their people to resist the efforts by the CDC and the government to protect them. We’ll be looking at those, probably in alphabetical order, or we may do it by blue/red states, or even just do the ones first that had lockdowns. Haven’t quite decided that yet.
I won’t of course be doing every country, but will be concentrating, inasmuch as I can, on those that had the biggest cases, those which entered lockdown first, those which had the most deaths and of course those who ignored, or tried to ignore it. This won’t be done alphabetically, but I think I will try to do it chronologically, as cases grew and deaths began to be reported. That being said, I am going to start with the three countries - or at least, with respect to smaller nations, the three significant countries - who decided to implement lockdowns first.