Claudius wrote:
A lot of it comes from a lack of sober leadership. If you take all the science and economics together, it’s relatively clear what you have to do in general.
As usual, though, the problems are political, and not technical. There's been some very average messaging in Australia—ten days ago our Prime Minister was still advocating going to the football—but nothing to compare to Trump's insistence that US businesses and churches can reopen at Easter.
It's not a surprise that beneath the rhetoric and the choice to use or not use fear-inducing terms such as "suppression" or "herd immunity", the science of epidemiology is relatively consistent everywhere, and that a raft of parameterised, speculative public health measures applied to abstract people also looks similar everywhere. Unfortunately, the rhetoric matters almost as much as the science due to its influence on behaviour.
It's what we actually see from politicians, concrete policy parameters and public behaviour that will make the difference between Italy and South Korea.
