In my understanding, Johnson is getting more criticism from outside the country than inside and other countries are laughing at us. Can you confirm this is true, at least for Germany?

It's about heat, not a lack of biting cold. If the virus hit in the northern hemisphere's summer months, I'd expect Italy and Spain to have slower COVID infections rates than more temperate European countries, ceteris paribus.

Yes there are factors far more important than heat, I didn't say otherwise. I'm saying it's a factor.

Yes, a lot of our more liberal/lefty outlets were very critical of Johnson anyway, and are all too happy to shit on him for mishandling the virus. But even the more conservative mainstream media is critical. Far more critical than they are about Macron, for example.

In the US, politico ran an article about how the UK emerged with a sense of national unity while the US remained bitterly divided:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/11/coronavirus-uk-us-brexit-trump-177924

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 9 2020 04:53am

I've read that article...not great imo.

It's important to note Boris Johnson's approval rating is still low, it's just the government's handling of coronavirus that is (or was in April) over 50%. Since overtaking Italy's death toll I suspect that will have dropped and I'm seeing some of the leading newspapers start to turn on the government, for example the Torygraph giving Starmer's plea to protect those in care homes on the front page this weekend.

Our national unity is stronger than in the US, but we're not a continent with partisan governors that have significant powers. If we did there would be more fighting going on than during the May years. I don't see the appreciation of health workers as unique to the UK just because it's nationalised, either.

Also, national unity isn't good unless it achieves something. What has this supposed national unity achieved in the UK? I'd rather be bitterly divided, have 7k deaths and be starting the premier league again next week!

Yeah, I get what you mean.

Regarding how well Germany came through this crisis, I think we got lucky in some ways. We just barely enacted the shutdown in time before the situation got out of hand, and were lucky to be able to draw the lessons from the neighboring countries around us. We were also lucky to have so many ICU beds. And no, we dont have so many of them because we're a rich, well organized country - we have so many of them because our healthcare system is over-treating elderly patients. A ton of 85 year olds are getting a hip replacement surgery and stuff like that, and these bogus surgeries are a large part of how our hospitals finance themselves. Furthermore, there were intense discussions in recent years about shutting down one or even two thirds of our hospitals to bundle treatment capacities in regional "centers of expertise". Had this virus hit us 4 years later, we might have been just as overwhelmed as France/Belgium/the UK.

i love how governments / leaders you disapprove of, that handled the crisis well so far, are only ever "lucky" and "favoured by circumstances" - and leaders you like, that completely botched their response through very obvious mismanagement and years of gutting their healthcare system for example, are merely "unlucky".
you wouldn't stop singing the praises of trump, had he shown the kind of competent, science-based, mature, compassionate, non-partisan, and effective leadership like merkel or ardern for example, but since they are not bigoted right wing demagogues, you have to act like it's all just coincidence, lol.

I'm not saying our government did bad, lol. On an objective scale from 1 to 10, I would rate them a 6/10, which places them in the top quarter of governments because so many others did so poorly.

It's still a fact that they just barely started the shutdown in time, and that they would have hesitated longer (too long) if Sebastian Kurz and subsequently Markus Söder hadnt pushed ahead and forced their hand. Remember that big televised address to the nation Merkel did on March 18, when it was already painfully obvious where things were headed, virologists were urging for a nationwide shutdown, everyone expected her to declare it, and then she didnt? For context: two days earlier, on March 16, Austrian chancellor Kurz had declared the shutdown for his country. Two days after Merkel's address, on March 20, Söder (the prime minister of the federal state of Bavaria, comparable to the governors in America) declared the shutdown for Bavaria, and another two days later, on March 22, Merkel and the rest of the state prime ministers followed suit. Without this pressure from Bavaria and Austria, our federal government would most likely have waited another 3-7 days.

Note that this time in mid-March is when we had exponential growth and the spread of the disease was at its highest level, numbers were doubling every 3-4 days during that time period.


Similarly, the things I wrote about our healthcare system are a fact - we happened to have a high number of ICU beds per capita because of a questionable system, not because of a deliberate preparedness strategy.



I think what you fail to understand is that there's not a perfect correlation between the quality of a government response and the health outcome. Italy had a medium-level response but a disastrous outcome because they were unlucky to be the first ones hit. Germany has a great health outcome based on an above-average but not really great government response. New Zealand and Australia have great responses and outcomes. The US and UK handled the virus bad and got a bad outcome. Switzerland handled the virus about as well as Germany (good but not great), yet has a much worse outcome (the large numbers of commuters from nearby northern italy are the main reason).

you fail to distinguish between 'understanding the intricacies of the situation', and how one 'chooses to present' them - you only ever fall back on more nuanced takes when someone points out that your simplistic narratives don't hold up, and then ironically act like the person pointing that out didn't understand them, lol.

that clearly demonstrates that you DO understand the situation better than your takes suggest, and that the spins are deliberate political hackery. the part about bavaria and austria is another perfect example of that, completely one-siding your 'analysis' by suggesting merkel's reply was merely a forced reaction to those more conservative politicians doing the right thing. funny how you completely ignored the fact that those were two infection hotspots in close geographic proximity to the the worst hit region in europe at the time, their shutdowns basically inevitable to a borderline effective response, and that the federal government explicitly on board with the states making those decision individually, based on their situations changing on a day to day basis. what you're trying to portray as 'merkel being forced into making a good decision against her will', is realistically her showing effective leadership by reacting to a chaotic and delicate situation by making decisions based on facts, rather than political calculation.

your whole post is yet another example of prime partisan hackery, and rejecting to give any credit based on merit, trying to put a lazy and transparent political spin on every possible aspect of this crisis in order to downplay how 'your' kind of leaders (right wing demagogues / late stage capitalists / authoritarians) have largely failed during this pandemic...

I didnt say that Merkel was forced into making a good decision against her will, I said she was forced into making this decision in time while she (and many prime ministers of other German states) was still hesitating and preferred to stick to her wait-and-see approach on a day-to-day basis for a bit longer. Which would have been a debacle, since case numbers were doubling every 3-4 days at the time. We could have gotten away even better if she had mustered the courage to act proactively for once in her political career and declared the shutdown on March 18, when she had THE perfect opportunity to do so during her televised address.

And the timing of her decision, which is really what's crucial here, was of course driven by political calculation. Denying this is ridiculous.


But hey, always nice to hear you, of all people, talking about lazy and transparent political spin.




The conservative or right-wing populist governments in Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Greece and Australia have all reacted very well to the coronavirus, while Trump and Johnson failed badly. Bolsonaro was never my cup of tea, neither is Putin; and I was always super anti-Erdogan anyway. The nationalist government in India is also taking the virus very serious.

By the way, the leftist governments in Spain, Belgium and Mexico have also failed quite badly. Sweden's socialist government was playing with fire. Macron in France was murky too. Italy gets a pass from me because they were caught first and unsuspecting. So it's not like there's an obvious left vs right split in how well governments have handled the virus.

I have to admit, however, that populist governments have tended to handle it worse than technocratic ones. Nonetheless, I think that the huge media focus on Trump (and to a lesser degree Johnson) distorts the picture. In the international press, Trump alone gets 20 times the media attention of Poland/Austria/Greece/Australia combined.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 9 2020 08:10am

why did she not do it then? literally all you have here is a wild hypothetical, solely based on your determination to give her as little credit as possible (even suggesting she should have been stricter, which btw is the complete opposite of what YOUR party of science-deniers and shutdown opponents keeps blasting her for - strangely something i haven't heard a single word of criticism from you about). this is EXACTLY what i mean by transparent and lazy political spin. even the objectively positive you try to portray in as bad of a light as humanly possible. what a desperate hack you are...

https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/EN/Frank-Walter-Steinmeier/Reden/2020/05/200508-75th-anniversary-World-War-II.html



Great speech. It must be weird having that baggage where being patriotic has a negative stigma attached to it, but Germany should be proud of how far they have come since 1945.