Government Responce COVID-19

COVID-19 Responses: Massive
Mistake or Success?

People don't trust their governments for a good reason. Governments lie to them regularly. In the ongoing COVID-19 event, initially people were told that there was little risk. The people came in the contact with a virus soon would get well, and the event then would be over.

We were advised to go about our day -- and many people did. They got on planes, departed for cruises, and went about their lives.

We were told not to wear masks. Moreover, we were told that wearing them might make us more likely to get sick.

Now tens of thousands of people around the world are dead.

The level of distrust in government appears to be at an all-time high when we need to follow government shelter and social distancing rules actively. We are still seeing pictures of parks and beaches crowded with people. Too many people still don't understand that 25 percent of those who have the virus and are spreading it have no symptoms.

Once testing ramps up, how are those people going to deal with the fact that the relative they visited may have died as a consequence?

Breaching Trust

This problem is hardly just a one nation problem, as it seems that almost every government initially downplayed the virus only to reverse itself when the impact of the illness overcame the various coverups. This practice began in China where the virus might have been, but wasn't, contained.

Bill Gates not only predicted this pandemic, but also identified the area where it would originate. We could have saved trillions of taxpayer dollars just by making sure there were strong early warning monitors in that area in case he was right -- which turned out to be the case.

Given that two pandemics -- COVID-19 and SARS -- likely originated from the same region, the world should demand ongoing monitoring to prevent the next pandemic from arising there. If China refuses, it should force China to pay for the resulting economic impact.

The real danger is that if people don't trust the government, they won't follow social distancing guidelines. There is also a good chance that once a vaccine is developed, many won't take it. The amount of distrust surrounding this pandemic seems unprecedented -- and anti-vaxxers effectively brought back the measles.

Lying to us about the need for masks was incredibly stupid .

Saying there wasn't a problem was crazy. Arguing that older people would be OK with dying to protect the economy was insane. If government(s) can't be trusted, then don't be surprised if citizens don't listen. We need citizens to listen.

Politicizing the Pandemic

There is a general trend to agree with everything a politician you like says and disagree with everything a politician you don't like says. We tend to be critical of politicians we don't like and full of praise for those we like. This behavior makes everything seem partisan. This results in two sets of truths -- and ironically, neither is true because both are massively biased.

This tendency drives behavior in politicians, because they know their backers will support anything they do, and their detractors won't support anything they do. CEOs who surround themselves with yes men and women tend to fail. The CEO who gets only negative feedback almost certainly will fail in spite of doing a good job. I would argue that if advisors are either continuously positive or consistently negative regardless of what a CEO does, the chief will avoid the always-negative advisors and fail, having not been able to learn from mistakes. If we fixed this feedback problem, we could improve the effectiveness of any administration regardless of party.

Right now the goal is to save lives -- not get elected. Dead people don't vote. This year is an election year for many countries, and I have no doubt that once the national campaigns take off again, the blame will get vetted fully, but we still have months to go and a lot of lives to save before that. Let's focus on what is essential now, and being

Wrapping Up

If people don't trust their governments, then they won't follow government guidelines, and the results from events like this one will be far more dire. If people, particularly politicians, praise and criticize based more on their political beliefs than on the truth, politicians won't do what we want and need them to do, which is to make the right reliable decisions.

Trading lives to protect the economy not only should not be done -- there should be every effort to make sure that kind of choice is never necessary (and I'm speaking as a boomer who effectively just landed on the "OK to die" list).

We need to start thinking strategically. How do we prevent the next pandemic? There likely will be a next one. We need better early warnings, better long-term behavior changes, and changes to both governmental and company policies, so that everyone rewards good behavior and universally penalizes bad behavior.