Also, don’t forget to vote.
Edit: spelling
By "hopefully provides a temporary relief", I was thinking on a longer scale as in maybe sometime next year and more along the lines of getting to come up for a breath when we've had a hand holding our heads below water for four years.
I mean this election is basically a forced choice between two grandpas and both are representing values from before I was born.
Where's the political party that I would trust to do what will secure a good future for my kids, because they, too, have young kids?
Where's the political party where people roughly my age are calling the shots?
US, France, Germany, UK, ... All I see is conservative old people. Germany and France tried to establish new center parties, but in both cases the newcomers quickly got infiltrated by old politicians and drifted far right, meaning conservative again.
If I've learned anything atop my 33 wise years old, is that any political candidate that looks like a clean break from the old guard, is exactly the same if not worse than its predecessors.
And this is just my cynicism: the corollary is that any candidate, new or old, is a bad choice, except extremely rare exceptions.
Labour’s last leader was magic grandpa boomer. The new one is slightly younger, come the next election he’ll only be in his early 60s.
Lib Dems had a young leader who (aged 39) managed to convert from being second in the June elections (led by a 70+ year old) to losing her seat in December, with a 7 year old and a baby.
There are relatively young leaders - Finland and New Zealand come to mind, but leaders tend to be reflections of the population. When the UK Labour Party was taken over by hundreds of thousands of young socialists via momentum in 2015, they didn’t chose the 45 year old (since christened king of he north), or the 46 year old with teenage kids, or even the 44 year old with no experience.
They chose the OAP career politician.
This is transitional and we'll see changes in the next political cycles. In the US it will be the post Nixon, post Reagan politicians, in the EU it will be the post Berlin Wall/unification politicians.
The problems of the 20th century are fading, but the problems of the 21st are crystalizing. Climate Change, the effects of 40 years of laissez faire capitalism and dergulation, the effects of casualisation of the work force and in many OECD societies, lack of wage growth or wealth of the lower/middle classes.
Needless to say, this is unlikely to change without a fight, since the status quo benefits the people in power on both sides.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MljLpcD0VWM
Deaths flat in case you were wondering: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sweden%20deaths%20coro...
I in no way meant to imply that anywhere else was less deserving of worry.
Europe isn't looking much different right now.
The past year has had irreparable damage to the U.S. It's hard to know where to even start, from slow production due to job loss and just everything going slower, poor health due to active cases and the decades of health care reverberations done from permanent damage and repeat infections, poor education due to an already broken primary and secondary school system basically being put on pause for a year, etc. The U.S. is literally fighting whether to re-elect a person who likely has clinical personality disorders and is probably well below even average intelligence, at the very best.
Realizing it's "only" 180 cases, yes, China is firing on all cylinders:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/29/large-covid-ou...
Although parts of continental Europe are struggling, there are others that have done okay - Norway and Finland, for example.
Outside of "the west", democratic countries in East Asia like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have done alright too. Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have their political issues, but they're less authoritarian than Vietnam and China - the whole lot of them are doing well. Most of Africa is too. South America, not so much.
So, it's not just about politics, and it's not just about geographic location, and it's not just about climate.
It will be interesting to see the analysis after all this is over. There must be something we can learn from why it was that certain countries failed at managing this virus while others succeeded.
Throwing up your hands and claiming it can’t be controlled in the west for some reason is a cop out and is also incorrect.
Politically, yes, but being islands with a significant distance to other countries does make them very different. It's somewhat easy to restrict travel to NZ or AU, but it's much harder in Europe.
Geographic location seems to play a role. Japan and Taiwan are islands, for all intents and purposes, so is South Korea (a mine field inhibits travel). Singapore and Malaysia have much fewer land-borders.
Restricting movement in Europe between countries is more comparable to restricting movement within a country. They don't have hard borders, generally no controls etc. Probably doable, but not without very authoritarian policies which I don't see happening (during the migrant crisis in 2015, the general narrative was that it's literally impossible to enforce borders in Europe).
Which is another significant policy that was implemented in Australia, both this year and during the Spanish flu pandemic. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/coronavirus-border-cl...