The West Gave Up On Wiping Out Covid — And That Was Its Big Mistake

The West Faces a Brutal, Bleak Covid Winter — While Normalcy is Returning in the East

umair haque
Eudaimonia and Co
Published in
10 min readDec 5, 2020

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Image Credit: Our World in Data

The West faces a bleak, brutal Covid winter. In America, numbers are exploding all over again — for the third time in a row. Across Europe, cases are falling, but from a massively high peak.

And as people congregate for the holidays, cases are likely to rise in the West all over again. In America, they are set to skyrocket to new heights, and in Europe, yet another wave is likely. Meanwhile, in much of the rest of the world — large parts of Asia, Africa — life is slowly returning to some semblance of normality.

What went wrong? The West made a mistake so fundamental, so elemental, so basic, that it’s still gone unexamined, and unremarked on. What is that mistake?

I live, part of the year, in one of the West’s most lively neighborhoods. A place famed for its bars, restaurants, clubs. In a regular year, millions of visitors pack it full, thronging the avenues for a taste of the culture, the nightlife, the music, and art that it gave birth to. For much of this one, though, my neighborhood was empty. Until recently, that is. Today, we went out for a little walk — and there everyone was. It’s Christmastime all over again — and the shoppers packed the stores, the pedestrians lined the avenue, the families strolled down the streets.

I tell you this story for a reason. It’s not (just) to shame all these people, though perhaps they do deserve a little bit of shame. What are they thinking, pretending like things are normal, while a deadly virus rises to new heights? The answer, though, is that they’re just thinking what they’ve been told to think, which is…nothing much at all. Let me explain what I mean.

Some of these people — many of them, maybe — are Covidiots, skeptics, nutcases, radicalized by even bigger idiots, thanks to Facebook and Twitter and so on. They’ll actively deny Covid exists or will minimize it as being just like the flu. But many more of them are another kind of idiot. They know Covid is real, and they even know that it’s dangerous. But they’re not able to think about it well, because nobody has taught them to. So they shrug and try to…

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