- 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.
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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:
- USNS Comfort hospital ship is leaving New York having treated hardly anybody. It was personally launched with great fanfare by President Donald Trump, and looked great on TV news, but was not a good solution.
- The NHS Nightingale hospital in London, built in a few days with a 4,000-bed capacity, is also treating very few patients. The limiting factor is staff availability.
- As Business Insider reported, there were problems with the flash-built hospitals in Wuhan too.
- Despite a flurry of headlines, big data and apps do not look capable of solving the huge challenge of contact-tracing.
- Hopes that an existing drug will neuter COVID-19 — like hydroxychloroquine, touted repeatedly by Trump — also appear more futile by the day.
The reality which is instead emerging is that the solutions to mastering the
Here is what we know is effective:
- Effective procurement of medical supplies from companies we've never heard of (and we've seen lots of the opposite).
- Contact tracing, which requires literally millions of hours of drudge-work.
- Properly managing healthcare systems and their capacities (Germany has done this well).
- Entire populations dutifully following annoying social-distancing rules for months at a time — like in China, and parts of Europe.
- Washing your hands, over and over and over.
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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