The War Against Covid-19 Pandemic: What Went Wrong? What Went Right? Losers And Winners (ePub)

Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was an extraordinary pandemic that swept the world very quickly and extensively from 2020 to 2022. It has wrought great damage to the world's economy and caused millions of deaths across the world. It was the biggest pandemic to hit humankind since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

How and why the Covid pandemic occurred remain unclear and are controversial questions. But there are certainly many lessons that the world can learn from this deadly pandemic. If we do not learn these lessons well, then the next pandemic will be even more dangerous and disastrous to humankind.

Some have viewed this pandemic as the revenge of nature on the over exploitation and abuse of the natural environment and other living things by humankind. Indeed, to prevent such calamities, humankind will have to learn to treat nature more sensitively and rationally. Humankind will have to relearn the art of coexisting with nature and protecting nature. After all, the earth is all we have as our home planet.

Clearly there was great disparity between countries in the death rate of the Covid pandemic: Total deaths per million population (DPM) over the 3 year period varies from 290 in Singapore, to 733 in Taiwan, 739 in Australia, 1410 in Denmark, 1767 in Hong Kong, 3413 in USA, 3555 in Romania, and 5074 in Hungary.

Why do people in the West think that their governments cannot be expected to do at least as good as the many governments in East Asian countries in keeping the Covid death toll low? This is despite the fact that the overall international statistics is irrefutable in showing the great discrepancies in outcomes between the East and the West. Strikingly, even Australia and New Zealand have had much lower death tolls from Covid than USA and Europe. It is nothing short of astounding that the Covid case fatality rate for Australia is 0.16% as compared to USA's 1.1%, and that Australia's Covid death per million population is one-fifth that of USA.

So, why are the West the biggest losers in this Covid war?