Vox: The 4 simple reasons Germany is managing Covid-19 better than its neighbors

 Germany gets a lot of favorable Covid-19 press — and for good reason. Its daily new cases per million people have been persistently lower than any of its Western European neighbors, and its death rate, from the beginning of the outbreak, has been among the lowest in Western Europe: currently 0.15 deaths per million people, compared to France’s 1.15 and Spain’s 2.19. [...]

What’s often cited is an effective deployment of technology, such as a contact tracing app, to fight the pandemic. There’s the frequently praised mass testing program, which rivals South Korea’s, and the oversupply of ICU beds — controversial before the coronavirus, now lauded. It also helps that Angela Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry and heads a country that treats scientists, like the Berlin-based virologist and podcaster Christian Drosten, like superstars. [...]

It wasn’t just Munich that had tests ready. In Berlin, scientists created the test kit the World Health Organization and many countries ended up using even before China released the sequence of the virus. But Fröschl points out that if that first patient had shown up in a less prepared part of the country, the outcome may have been different — perhaps something more like what happened in Italy, where cases went undetected for weeks and then overwhelmed the health system. “I’m always emphasizing,” Fröschl says, “we were just lucky.” [...]

There was also learning from other countries. “We tried to take the strategy of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan — all good examples of how a quick and fast response can reduce the number of positive cases,” said Nicolai Savaskan, the chief medical officer of a local health department in Berlin. One part of that fast response: Germany’s mass testing program. While Germany was quick to lock down, it also scaled up testing from the start of the pandemic, and then repeatedly adapted the program to respond to changes in the epidemic dynamics.

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New Statesman: Anatomy of a crisis

In theory, the UK was well-prepared for a pandemic. The Global Health Security Index for 2019 – which measures preparedness – rated only the US higher. Yet the UK has one of the world’s highest official Covid-19 death rates per capita, and its excess deaths during the pandemic period are 45 per cent higher than expected in a typical year. A survey, commissioned by the New Statesman, of more than 500 UK-based business leaders, 72 per cent of whom work for organisations with revenues of more than $250m a year, revealed that 38 per cent thought the UK was well prepared to handle the outbreak, but only 25 per cent thought the government responded well. [...]

Just as the UK locked down late, it lifted lockdown early. At the time restrictions were first eased the UK was still recording nearly seven deaths per million population per day – higher than any other country at the point of lockdown release. [...]

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has predicted the UK economy will shrink by 11.5 per cent in 2020 – more than any other country in the group. Job losses have so far been mitigated by the furlough scheme: while the unemployment rate quadrupled in the US between January and April, in the UK it remained static at 3.9 per cent. However, furloughed workers may find they have no job to go to when the scheme ends in October, and the number seeking unemployment-related benefits has more than doubled. [...]

Boris Johnson – like all leaders in the comparator group – saw his approval rating rise in the early stages of the pandemic. By the end of May it had fallen back to roughly where it was at the time of the UK’s first Covid-19 death. Leaders in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Canada and South Korea all preserved increases of between 5.7 and 18.9 percentage points. The only world leaders to suffer bigger falls in their approval ratings were Shinzo Abe of Japan, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Donald Trump. Only 33 per cent of our survey respondents rated Johnson’s leadership during the crisis positively. While the Chancellor Rishi Sunak had a net approval score of 21 per cent, Johnson’s was -1 per cent, the lowest of any government member we asked business leaders to rate.

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New Statesman: The hot war in the east

In retrospect the hubristic complacency infecting all three communist capitals seems astounding. Stalin, of course, was operating on a policy of limited liability, turning Mao into the banker of last resort as his price for the new Sino-Soviet pact. In Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (Columbia University Press), a magisterial new study using archives from all the key countries, the American historian Samuel F Wells Jr observes that, “At Stalin’s insistence, Mao agreed to give Kim a blank cheque to cash if he got into trouble.” There were shades of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the July crisis of 1914. And the parallels don’t stop there. Kim lacked the logistical capacity for a war lasting more than a few weeks. “Much like the German Schlieffen Plan…” comments the military historian Allan Millett, “the North Koreans planned for a short war since it was the only war they could win.” [...]

Like many crisis decisions by leaders, the president was acting from the gut but also on his reading of the past. “Korea is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman told an aide – alluding to the firm line he had taken on providing anti-communist aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947. “If we are tough now,” he added, “they won’t take any next steps.” But, “There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.” The president also took the international dimension seriously, commenting that the UN was “our idea” in 1945 and “in this first big test we just couldn’t let them down”. [...]

As Truman’s biographer Robert J Donovan observes, “war without congressional approval” was “a costly mistake”, for which the president later paid a heavy price when he lost control of the conflict. At this stage in the fighting, political and public opinion was largely supportive. That was true even of a senior Republican such as Senator Robert A Taft, who accused Truman on 28 June of embarking on “de facto war” with North Korea “without consulting Congress” and warned that “if the president can intervene in Korea without congressional approval” he could “go to war in Malaya or Indonesia”. (Taft might as easily have said Vietnam: in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson followed the same tactic as Truman.) Yet Taft added that he would be willing to vote for a resolution of approval if one were put before Congress. The president, however, considered that he had sufficient constitutional authority as commander in chief, and he was confident that the fighting would be over quickly. [...]

Yet Washington had no idea what that job would entail and lacked even rudimentary information about what was going on behind the bamboo curtain. Although Truman had created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, in its early years the CIA lived up to none of those three words. Not only did it fail to deliver accurate intelligence on many of the major crises of the late 1940s – including the Soviet atomic test – its actions were lethargic and, far from being centralised, it operated as a series of rival fiefdoms spread out in ten different buildings across Washington, DC. In the spring of 1950, after a Soviet spy notified Moscow that the US had broken the codes used by the USSR to communicate with its emissaries in Beijing and Pyongyang, the ciphers were changed and the CIA went blind during the crucial months before the North Korean attack.

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UnHerd: The defector taking on Kim Jong-un

Park is a remarkable and resolute man. Once he was a rising young bureaucrat from a well-connected family, a fervent believer in the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea for more than seven decades. Today he is public enemy number one in the North, having fled to the South and dedicated his life to defeating the brutal regime that brainwashed him along with 25 million other citizens. He has survived assassination attempts, death threats and even missile responses to these nocturnal launches of clandestine materials. In recent days, he has been denounced again as ‘human scum’.

Yet he is also detested by South Korean authorities who see this diminutive dissident as a danger to their stability. They have launched legal actions and legislative efforts to thwart his activism. And now he is at the centre of rising tensions in the region. [...]

Yet the North’s fury also indicates the success of the activities pursued by Park and other dissident groups as they send in contraband to corrode the hermit kingdom from within by undermining belief in the bloodstained Kim dictatorship. I have heard from several dissidents about how they would watch foreign soap operas and films secretly to see the clothes, the cars and the food that strongly challenged their own government’s claims about life being so much better under their thumb. I also met a woman jailed for eight years for watching foreign films, and a party cadre — a member of the state censorship team — who defected after being caught sharing seized books and films with his friends. [...]

President Moon has promised a crackdown on such efforts and tried to sue Park and his brother, to the anger of the conservative opposition party. Yet many of his countrymen look down at dissidents and show little interest in the suffering of North Koreans trapped in the bubble of the world’s most barbaric state. The balloon launches also infuriate people living near the border when they fall short and spew rubbish over homes in the area — although satellite trackers found some flew almost 500 miles to Vladivostok in Russia.

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Social Europe: The big failure of small government

From the United States and the United Kingdom to Europe, Japan and South Africa, governments are investing billions—and, in some cases, trillions—of dollars to shore up national economies. Yet, if there is one thing we learned from the 2008 financial crisis, it is that quality matters at least as much as quantity. If the money falls on empty, weak or poorly-managed structures, it will have little effect, and may simply be sucked into the financial sector. Too many lives are at stake to repeat past errors.[...]

Consider two core government responsibilities during the Covid-19 crisis: public health and the digital realm. In 2018 alone, the UK government outsourced health contracts worth £9.2 billion ($11.2 billion), putting 84 per cent of beds in care homes in the hands of private-sector operators (including private-equity firms). Making matters worse, since 2015, the UK’s National Health Service has endured £1 billion in budget cuts. [...]

New Zealand is another success story, and not by coincidence. After initially adopting the outsourcing mantra in the 1980s, the New Zealand government changed course, embracing a ‘spirit of service’ and an ‘ethic of care’ across its public services, and becoming the first country in the world to adopt a wellbeing budget. Owing to this vision of public management, the government adopted a ‘health first, economy second’ approach to the current crisis. Rather than seeking herd immunity, it committed early to preventing infection.

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Social Europe: Keeping the promise of eurozone convergence

Fundamentally, they are political. Technical proposals for rendering the eurozone robust have been tabled time and again: a eurozone investment budget, a European deposit-insurance scheme, a proper eurozone unemployment-(re)insurance system, the issuance of joint- and several-liability eurobonds. And, time and time again, these have been discussed, diluted and typically disposed of in a drawer.

The truth is there is insufficient trust to move forward. Resilience requires risk-sharing; risk-sharing requires trust. Trust, however, has been eroded by disappointment—disappointment that a decade of austerity has failed to reduce debt, disappointment that two decades of the euro have failed to bring convergence. [...]

This promise has not been fulfilled. On the contrary, the eurozone has been drifting apart—since long before the current crisis. While in 1999, GDP per capita in northern Europe was around €2,000 above the eurozone average, by 2019 it was €4,500 higher. Conversely, Italy and other southern-European countries have lost ground, from about €4,000 below the eurozone average in 1999 to €7,500 below 20 years later. Instead of shrinking, the gap has doubled. [...]

A more promising approach is to even out the regional distribution of value added. Andalusia, the Uckermark and metropolitan areas such as Naples or Thessaloniki should be brought to similar levels of productivity as Munich, Milan or the Amsterdam metropolitan area.

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The Red Line: The Geopolitics of North Korea

There are few geopolitical flashpoints in the world more dangerous than North Korea, and with instability at the top of the regime we can add another layer of complexity to an already shaky situation; one that few people truly understand.

USA, China, Seoul and Pyongyang all have competing goals and needs to keep their own domestic politics in check, but some of those goals infringe upon others, and with a few minor missteps the Korean peninsula could easily break out in full war again. The difference this time is that there are 60+ nuclear weapons to factor into the equation.

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WorldAffairs: North Korea, Russia and the Nuclear Threat

As we’ve learned from this pandemic, human beings can act quickly in the face of immediate danger. However, we’re not so good at taking action against slow-moving threats. The threat posed by nuclear weapons is now as high as it’s been since the Cold War. This week on WorldAffairs, we talk about North Korea with veteran aid worker Katharina Zellweger, Pulitzer-nominated journalist Jean Lee and North Korean defector Joseph Kim. We also discuss Russia and nuclear proliferation with Dr. Ernest Moniz, who served as Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration.

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Social Europe: The four worlds of the social-ecological state

From this point of view, a speech by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on March 12th, amid the shock of the Covid-19 health crisis, appeared as an epiphany as radical as it was late: ‘What this pandemic is already revealing is that free health care, without condition of income, course or profession, our welfare state, are not costs or burdens, but precious goods, essential assets when fate strikes … There are goods and services which must be placed outside the laws of the market.’ [...]

The decade that is opening is indeed that of the ecological challenge: faced with climate change, the destruction of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems—visible and tangible everywhere on the planet—human communities must initiate a profound transformation of attitudes and behaviours to prevent the 21st century being one of self-destruction of human wellbeing. The first months of the first year of this decisive decade leave little doubt about the urgency of this collective effort.

First, Australia was ravaged by a succession of giant fires, which only rain eventually extinguished. Then the Covid-19 pandemic rendered inactive almost half of humanity and, with that, the global economy. Yet the worldwide health crisis is, at its origin, ecological: this virus—as before it SARS, MERS, Ebola and to some extent HIV-AIDS—is a pathology of the human-animal frontier. It is because humans have gone too far in the destruction of ecosystems, the conquest of biodiversity and the commodification of life that they are today affected, panicked and paralysed—in other words conquered in turn.

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Vox: The big lesson from South Korea's coronavirus response

In South Korea, citizens have flattened the curve of the novel coronavirus -- and it's because of lessons they learned from fighting the MERS outbreak in 2015. Through a combination of aggressive and widespread testing measures, along with a system know as “contact tracing,” they’ve been better positioned to spot the path of the virus and curb its spread. While they are still vigilant for a second wave of Covid-19 cases, people in South Korea are slowly returning to public life. Watch the video above to find out how their testing and contact tracing measures work, and how it can be a lesson for countries still in lockdown.

Fortune: Countries that mandate TB vaccine are seeing fewer coronavirus deaths

The preliminary study posted on medRxiv, a site for unpublished medical research, finds a correlation between countries that require citizens to get the bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine and those showing fewer number of confirmed cases and deaths from Covid-19. Though only a correlation, clinicians in at least six countries are running trials that involve giving frontline health workers and elderly people the BCG vaccine to see whether it can indeed provide some level of protection against the new coronavirus.

Gonzalo Otazu, assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, started working on the analysis after noticing the low number of cases in Japan. The country had reported some of the earliest confirmed cases of coronavirus outside of China and it hadn’t instituted lockdown measures like so many other countries have done. [...]

Among high-income countries showing large number of Covid-19 cases, the U.S. and Italy recommend BCG vaccines but only for people who might be at risk, whereas Germany, Spain, France, Iran and the U.K. used to have BCG vaccine policies but ended them years to decades ago. China, where the pandemic began, has a BCG vaccine policy but it wasn’t adhered to very well before 1976, Otazu said. Countries including Japan and South Korea, which have managed to control the disease, have universal BCG vaccine policies. Data on confirmed cases from low-income countries was considered not reliable enough to make a strong judgment.

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The Spectator: Iceland has good and bad news about the coronavirus

In Iceland — a small country of 360,000 people with a strong healthcare system — coronavirus testing has been accompanied by population screening. Yet even with the hardline approach taken here involving early quarantining, self-isolation and infection tracing, infections have rapidly become widespread. There is no doubt that the virus’s spread has been just as far and wide in other European countries, where the number of tests is fewer and the follow-up, in many cases, much more lax.

So what can we learn from Iceland’s approach? The testing conducted by the National Health Service in Iceland along with further screening has already yielded some interesting results. Researchers at DeCode genetics have found 40 mutations of the coronavirus in Iceland alone; one individual had been infected by two variants at the same time. This is both good and bad news: the theory is that such mutations will make the virus more contagious but potentially less dangerous to those that are affected. Screening also indicates that children seem much less likely to catch the virus, but this may be influenced by the fact that children generally have mild symptoms. [...]

So have European countries really learnt anything from the experience of other places where the virus has started to wane in its severity? Too few lessons have been taken, it would seem. Graphs showing the spread of the virus in South Korea compared to Western European countries paint a startling picture. While the spread leveled off early after a significant outbreak in South Korea, European countries have continued to experience exponential growth. Other Far East countries such as Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and indeed China have also appeared to have considerable success in limiting the spread of the virus.

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PolyMatter: The Politics of Coronavirus

SciShow: Is COVID-19 a Pandemic? | March 2020 Update

SARS-CoV-2 is a new kind of coronavirus that appeared suddenly in late 2019. The disease it causes, called COVID-19, is now showing signs that it's able to spread outside of its place of origin. This raises some questions... like, do we have a pandemic on our hands? What’s the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic? SciShow News has some facts to help you understand a complex and rapidly changing situation.

Vox: Teaching in the US vs. the rest of the world

Teachers in America have a uniquely tough job. But it doesn't have to be that way.

From hours worked to pay rates, countries like Finland, Japan, and South Korea make teaching a more respected and sustainable profession.

PolyMatter: The Economics of K-Pop

WorldAffairs: Understanding the Leadership of Kim Jong Un

Since becoming the supreme leader of North Korea in 2011, Kim Jong Un has solidified his power base at home, clearing out his father’s top advisors and expanding the nation’s nuclear program. While he’s often characterized by his odd behavior, he has successfully maintained domestic dictatorial rule while also exerting international pressure to establish state legitimacy. Anna Fifield, Beijing bureauchief for The Washington Post and author of “The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Jong Un”, talks with Markos Kounalakis, WorldAffairs co-host and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, about how a better understanding of North Korea’s leader might lead to improved relations with the closed-off nation.

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Foreign Policy: Moon Jae-in Is the Grown-Up at the Table

The Hanoi summit fell apart as both North Korea and the United States entered the summit with maximalist demands, with no alternative smaller deals on the table. In the working-level talks leading up to the summit, North Korean delegates demanded that the United States remove strategic assets from Hawaii and Guam—a delusional request, even as an opening gambit. The U.S. negotiators made clear that even the demand that North Korea ultimately made at the Hanoi summit—namely that the United States lift the five United Nations sanctions in exchange for dismantling the nuclear facility in Yongbyon—would be a nonstarter, as those sanctions provide most of the U.S. leverage. Yet on meeting with Trump in Hanoi, Kim made the same demand with no fallback position. It’s not clear why. Perhaps Kim thought he could pull a fast one by Trump, or the Pyongyang brain trust was drinking its own Kool-Aid as to the value of the Yongbyon nuclear facility, an aging complex that would likely have to be scuttled soon at any rate. [...]

The Hanoi summit was not a total failure, since it at least clarified the parameters of what is being offered and the asking price of each party. The summit also showed a deal was within reach, putting to bed the persistent claim in Washington foreign-policy circles that no deal with North Korea can be possible. In the post-summit press conference, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho stated the negotiation came down to “one more step” that the U.S. delegates demanded in addition to the demolition of the Yongbyon facility. In an interview given in Russia, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui claimed that Trump was willing to consider sanctions relief on a “snapback” basis, making the relief reversible if North Korea did not make progress in denuclearization. It appears that, despite the initial maximalist stances, the two countries managed to narrow the gap but could not quite overcome the difference in the initial asking prices. [...]

A plausible deal aimed at North Korea’s denuclearization can look like the following: North Korea would freeze all production of long-range missiles and fissile materials, dismantle Yongbyon, and allow U.S. inspectors on the ground to ensure compliance. Pyongyang would also host a U.S. liaison office, which could look after the safety of the U.S. inspectors. In exchange, the United States would grant exemptions to South Korea-led joint economic projects, declare the formal end of the Korean War, and host a North Korean liaison office in Washington. As U.S. inspectors identify additional nuclear facilities in North Korea and oversee their dismantlement, the United States would gradually normalize the relationship with North Korea and ease sanctions on a snapback basis. The end result, in the best-case scenario, would be to have the denuclearized North Korea be another version of Poland or Vietnam—a former enemy that is now a U.S. security interest.

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VICE: The South Korean Love Industry

With one of the lowest birth rates in the world, South Koreans are predicted to become extinct by 2750.

Because of the rapidly ageing population this situation has created, elderly prostitutes known as "Bacchus ladies" have cornered a number of public parks as their working areas. Meanwhile, as the marriage rate falls and the country's younger generation continues to live at home well into their twenties, young people have been forced to book themselves into purpose-built sex motels to avoid the prying eyes of parents.

We sent Matt Shea to investigate this generational crisis, which led him to Seoul's Red Light District, a pre-wedding photo-shoot on the set of a Korean soap opera, and an erotic sculpture park on South Korea's "honeymoon island".

UnHerd: This demographic catastrophe will hit us all

Birth rates of well below replacement level are now commonplace in the developed world. For instance, Italy’s is about 1.4. If such a rate is maintained over three generations then that means the second generation will be 70% of the size of the first, and the third generation half the size of the first. That’s quite the demographic slide, but consider what happens if the birth rate drops even lower to approximately 1. If that is maintained over three generations, then the second generation will be half the size of the first, and the third a mere quarter. In other words a fall in the fertility rate from 1.4 to 1, which South Korea shows is possible, doubles the rate at which new generations halve in size. [...]

These factors may explain why South Korea has an especially low birth rate, but it’s worth remembering that birth rates are also falling in the most progressive, sexually egalitarian parts of the world – such as the Nordic countries. Even Finland, with its ‘baby box’ package of support for new parents and its impressive schools, has seen its birth rate hit record lows. [...]

We talk about the ‘greying’ of populations due to increasing longevity, but the biggest story is not one of improved retention, but a collapse in recruitment. The fact that birth rates are lowest in the east Asian economies that have low levels of compensatory immigration, but which are also relied upon as the drivers of global economic growth, has implications for everyone.

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