How should governments prepare for covid-19? By talking to the public and enacting painstaking, logistical planning
Yet all those outcomes depend greatly on what governments choose to do, as China shows. Hubei province, the origin of the epidemic, has a population of 59m. It has seen more than 65,000 cases and a fatality rate of 2.9%. By contrast, the rest of China, which contains 1.3bn people, has suffered fewer than 13,000 cases with a fatality rate of just 0.4%. Chinese officials at first suppressed news of the disease, a grave error that allowed the virus to take hold.
Yet even if many countries could not, or should not, exactly copy China, its experience holds three important lessons—to talk to the public, to slow the transmission of the disease and to prepare health systems for a spike in demand. Even well-meaning attempts to sugarcoat the truth are self-defeating, because they spread mistrust, rumours and, ultimately, fear. The signal that the disease must be stopped at any cost, or that it is too terrifying to talk about, frustrates efforts to prepare for the virus’s inevitable arrival. As governments dither, conspiracy theories coming out of Russia are already sowing doubt, perhaps to hinder and discredit the response of democracies.
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