Guardian EDITORIAL May 12, 2020
"Putting aside all comments about how many tests we are doing in T&T, just over two thousand now, one of the lowest in the world, and that apparently includes 652 community tests in the past two weeks, all negative, although no one knows what the criteria for testing people in the community are and forgetting for the moment the apparent increase in deaths from pneumonia, MoH says they are too busy to check out the figures and compare them to previous years, the question must be how did we do this?
How did little T&T eliminate the virus so quickly?
There appear to be five or six schools of thought."
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In The NYTimes, Only White Leaders Stand Out
The New York Times recently published a list of ‘true leaders’ in the fight against COVID-19. They spend exactly one sentence on Asia and the rest on white leaders that mostly did worse than Iran. The structural racism is mind-boggling, and it’s getting people killed.
According to the NYTimes, Iran Completely and Utterly Botched Its Response to the Coronavirus, but countries with higher mortality rates like Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark are listed as true leaders. It makes no sense. It’s just racism, so structural that the Editorial Board can’t even see it. It’s built into the edifice of the paper itself.
By any objective measure, the true leaders are all not in the west, with asterisks for Iceland and Greece. Basically everywhere else is doing markedly better — Asia, Australasia, Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of South America. Every major western leader has failed and this list is actively making people stupider.
In an age of pandemic, this blithe ignorance doesn’t just mean random brown weddings are getting drone struck. The ignorance of the New York Times is now getting its own readers killed.
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