Comment by keymon-o | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keymon-o | Hacker News Reader

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>I think people underestimate social awareness

Not that I disagree with you, but I'd guess that social awareness is a product of having a trustful sources of information coming from trustworthy and capable leaders/government. It seems to me that handling of covid crisis is clearly correlated with how well people of a certain country do trust and respect their elected leaders.

Edit: It all reminds me of an excercise from some teamwork and leadership class, where there was a given logical problem to be solved in 45 minutes between teammates. And no matter how smart, proactive, arrogant or quiet members they had, all the teams failed to solve a problem. The issue was everybody participating in solving a problem which turned into 45 hour debate, rather than having a leader coordinating the path to solution.

It may be an oversimplifaction, but when you have a crisis which you don't know how to solve, you can at least try to handle it the best you can. Without trust in leadership, it will be chaotic.

Team programming competitions are like that, and basically the strategy is to give everybody on the team 10 minutes to read all tasks and choose the one they are confident they can solve and then work in parallel. No time for coordination overhead. If you talk about everything you won't finish even one task.

But COVID response is nothing like that - we've had months before it got to Europe and over a year at this point. So I don't think it's a good analogy.

My point was about how well can a society work when there is mutual trust between leadership and followers, not about solving a problem efficiently. Although I did go off the subject with the anecdote.

What is your take on handling the Covid crisis in Europe?

I don't think trust and coordination is the main problem. There were some mistakes caused by things we didn't knew about the pandemic early on, but most of the things experts said were correct, and most regular people treated the restrictions seriously early on. Governments simply had other priorities than listening to experts.

For example I've seen a lot of people taking the restrictions seriously early in 2020 in my country (Poland), but the restrictions often made no sense (they banned people from going to forests but never banned them from going to churches and kept schools working most of the time for political reasons, ministry of health first said that masks aren't necessary because they do nothing against covid, then he made masks mandatory, prime minister asked people to stay at home and closed down the economy when we had 100 cases in the country, then because of elections gave away free holidays trips and said Covid is behind us when we had thousands of cases, president said he doesn't believe in vaccination to get antivaxer support before elections, then again they introduced very strict (and random) restrictions, then banned abortion agaisnt the public opinion knowing full well it will cause mass protests in the middle of the 3rd wave in autumn 2020 - then healthcare was completely paralyzed and 60 000 surplus people died in a 38 000 000 country in a few months).

Basically limiting the loss of lives caused by covid was never a priority for the government - the priority was to keep as much support as possible, show that they are doing something, get favors done for their political vassals and get politically ahead of the opposition at whatever cost.

So I really can't be surprised by all the antivaxers and tinfoilers that showed up after all of that :/

>he doesn't believe in vaccination to get antivaxer support before elections

Just, wow!

Essentially, the same thing here in Croatia. Our people have a wide spectre of ideologic views with a very different take on crisis, out of which currently very few trusts the government.

In the initial wave, government made very good results with keeping covid numbers down, and they were very widely accepted and respected. Even though there were some non-sense, people were glad just to know government reacting effitiently and strategically.

But the government lost all the trust now with promoting vaccination with some very odd restrictions and suprisingly stupid rhetoric, without honesty or explanations. There is probably much more truth to why everything just went down the drain, but I would say the main goal is to force out vaccination with no exception.

I do not respect or support our government ideologically nor due to their competence. The crisis would just be more managable if they had our trust right now, but they've lost it and I don't see it turning back. And I do not see how will they handle the crisis with so little support.

I may have sounded like I was proposing blind trust, rather than trust in return of transparency, honesty etc from leaders/governement. Because in essence I think we are talking about the same thing.

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