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Dramatic mega-projects meant to combat the coronavirus are proving a waste of time. The real solution is boring competence.

Apr 22, 2020, 21:06 IST
Business Insider
Business Insider

President Donald Trump at the launch of the USNS Comfort, deployed to New York City on March 28, 2020. It was ordered home less than a month later, having treated fewer than 200 people.AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

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  • Nobody is quite sure how best to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, but one thing is becoming clear.
  • Dramatic mega-projects like building new hospitals in a week, or sending a Navy ship to New York City, are underperforming.
  • Meanwhile, successful responses tend to focus on dull but effective things, like medical procurement, contact tracing, and sustained adherence to social distancing.
  • This is not psychologically satisfying, but is essential to understand in order to respond well.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Nobody has a perfect playbook for fixing the coronavirus. That's one of the reasons Insider is fixating so closely on the differences in various countries' approaches.

This pandemic is a horrible, involuntary, international experiment which we are all trying to figure out at once. The costs of failure are enormous.

However, in recent days it has become clearer what does not work: flashy, media-friendly ideas which sound drastic but achieve little.

Some examples:

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The reality which is instead emerging is that the solutions to mastering the coronavirus are boring. They require dull logistics, sustained effort, and endless repetition.

Here is what we know is effective:

This lesson is not unique to the coronavirus. But our brains appear hard-wired to resist this truth, which has rarely been so important to see.

Unfortunately, at least in the UK and US, the current heads of government are especially drawn to mega-project solutions (Boris Johnson and his bridges, Trump's infamous Mexico border wall).

The sooner they resist such thinking and focus instead on the dreary fundamentals, the better.

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