The Economist Why governments get covid-19 wrong

From: The Economist - Thursday Sep 24, 2020 06:58 pm

The Economist

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September 24TH 2020

The Economist this week

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Our cover this week focuses on the pandemic. Within the next few days the global number of recorded deaths from covid-19 will surpass 1m. Perhaps another 1m have gone unrecorded. India has been registering over 90,000 new cases a day. Some European countries that thought they had suppressed the disease are in the throes of a second wave. In America, where the official death toll this week exceeded 200,000, the seven-day case total is rising again. Those figures represent a lot of suffering. Yet, amid the gloom, keep three things in mind. The statistics contain good news as well as bad. Treatments and medicines are making covid-19 less deadly. And societies have the tools to control the disease today. It is here, in the basics of public health, where too many governments are still failing their people. Covid-19 will remain a threat for months, possibly years. They must do better.

Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-In-Chief

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The world this week

Donald Trump marshalled enough Republican votes in the Senate to consider a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the election on November 3rd. Ms Ginsburg’s death gives the party a window to fill her seat on the Supreme Court with a conservative, further tipping its ideological balance to the right. Ms Ginsburg, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993, was accorded the honour of lying in state in the Capitol building, the first woman to do so.

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More from politics this week

There was some confusion about a tentative deal that will allow TikTok, a video-sharing app, to stay in business in the United States. Donald Trump gave his “blessing” to an agreement that would see Oracle and Walmart take a 20% stake in a newly formed TikTok Global, which would then rely on Oracle to provide it with cloud services. But Oracle and ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, issued contradictory statements about the ownership of the new business, with ByteDance describing it as a “subsidiary”. China’s state media raged against the deal, describing it as “bullying and extortion”. TikTok asked a court to block an impending order that will in effect shut its operations in America over security concerns.

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