No One Was Prepared For This
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I came across this chart ranking the countries who are supposedly well prepared for a pandemic.Lets be honest who are they kidding as if I look around the World today only one or two countries seem to know what they are doing and are prepared. I would love to know who finances this research as the funding may have skewed to how they rate each country.
I don't think a country can be rated highly for dealing with a pandemic unless they manufacture their own health equipment. Personal protection equipment or PPE is so crucial yet it seems no country had control over their manufacturing. Everything was outsourced to China showing a lack of understanding and importance.
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Just some insight to show you where Covid-19 sits amongst what has come before us.
What Covid-19 has shown is that no country was prepared and showed serious weaknesses in the health care system across the world. If one looks at the overall success per country only a few stand out as having been on top of it.
Singapore had a special division just for this type of pandemic and have been on top of it from day one. Having had nearly 17 500 cases yet only 16 deaths would give me a positive reassurance if I was living there. The reality is no one knows enough just yet if this virus is as bad as what everyone says it is. There are so many strains that some of us could already of had and don't even know it.
South Africa is ranked at 34 on the Global Health Security index and they are no where near ready. Maybe they are now as they locked the country up for 5 weeks whilst getting the medical supplies they may need. This doesn't say they were ready as they only had 1000 ICU beds available countrywide.
The thing is do you trust your health care system? When I lived in the UK I made sure I was on private health care and now the same in South Africa. I have been horrified whilst visiting friends in hospital in the past forcing me to go the private route.
This whole GHS ranking is a farce and having the States and the UK at the top when we know they had to panic buy to get PPE is not telling the true story. I think the rest of the world had a wake up call when the Chinese Government placed a ban on all PPE exports. This was overturned but still showed everyone what they all need to do in the future.
If you are not in control of your health care factories then you are not in control and it is as simple as that. It is amazing that after only 5 or 6 weeks most countries are already making their own masks and sanitizers. If it was that easy then why wasn't this already in place.
The world has given up too much already by giving away business which should never have left their shores. The time has come to start emptying out the eggs from the Chinese basket and making things that much safer and secure for the future. I read last week that the EU was doing just this and on a big scale. The truth is no one trusts the Chinese and are now more than ever changing their procurement policies.
What gets me is the masses of people that are rallying behind the "stay home forever" notion. These people are normally someone who is fortunate enough to have work that is easy to do remotely. What i don't think these people are considering is that although their job can be done that way, the company that they work for almost certainly produces a product that has to be physically built and distributed by actual working people..... and if that dries up, their job will be kaput as well. They'll be singing a different tune when that time comes.
As to the medical preparedness, i think a lot of it is based on the existence of medical facilities and probably overall affluence of the country in question. Seeing USA at the top seems like a mistake considering the death toll in the country but then again, just because you have the correct mechanisms in place, doesn't mean you know how to use them effectively.
Then we have to introduce the misinformation and the apparent desire to label every death as a Covid death for some sort of perhaps, politically motivated reason.