Can't have been that ill if they managed to travel from London to Durham.
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Going back to something Tactical Genius said on the last page, this is South India, rather than Africa, but instructive nonetheless (from the NYT's excellent Interpreter newsletter).
There’s doing a good job. There’s doing a great job. And then there’s doing what the southern-Indian state of Kerala has done to control its coronavirus outbreak, which is a job so astonishingly effective that it calls into question some bedrock assumptions about how the world works. In other words: It’s perfect fodder for The Interpreter. One of the implicit assumptions of western capitalism has always been that wealth was what would allow a democratic government to provide for the public during good times, and to protect it from harm during crises. Then came the pandemic. The American government’s performance in this particular crisis has shown that wealth is not a sufficient condition for good government response. But Kerala’s performance suggests that it’s not even a necessary one. Per-capita gross domestic product in the United States is about 30 times bigger than in Kerala. Even the poorest U.S. state, Mississippi, still has a per-capita G.D.P. about 15 times bigger than Kerala’s.Kerala had its first confirmed case of Covid-19 on Jan. 30, just nine days after the first confirmed case in the United States. As of today, the coronavirus has killed 94,700 people in the United States. In Kerala, that number is four. Pavithra Suryanarayan, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies state capacity in Kerala and its neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, had some insights about why Kerala has been so successful in fighting the pandemic — and why the United States has struggled. The interview made for one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in a long time. Here’s our discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity.) Amanda Taub: I am trying to get some context for Kerala’s success against the coronavirus. There is such a huge contrast with America’s major struggles. Can you help me understand how that has happened? Pavithra Suryanarayan: We can think about three things that matter. One is: Does the state actually have the ability to do something when something like the coronavirus happens? AT: I think before this pandemic, if you had asked most Americans in the abstract, “If a pandemic strikes and the United States is in danger, and we are facing the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives as well as a chunk of the economy, will the government take swift action to protect the country?” they would have said yes! But it turns out not to be that simple. But the second is: Even if the state has the ability to do something, does it actually do it when it needs to? You have to have a political will that aligns with the capacity. You have to have some basic understanding within the system that, regardless of who the party in power is, a certain basic political will is going to be exercised, to make the state do the things it’s supposed to do when the crisis hits. PS: Nobody would have thought the U.S. would not be able to do this!
But you really see that the key factor is whether you are going to use the state to do what it’s supposed to. And Kerala, and also the neighboring state Tamil Nadu, have both shown that they have the capacity and they have the will to act.AT: So that’s two factors: state capacity and political will. But you said there were three. PS: The third dimension, which gets a lot less attention, is whether you have been exposed to a crisis of this sort before. So here, East Asian countries and those countries that do a lot of migration with Southeast Asian countries, like Australia and New Zealand, because they’re so proximate to Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, they knew what to do as soon as the coronavirus alarm was blared. They did not mess around, because they’d already experienced the previous waves of bird flu, and of SARS. And it’s the same with Kerala. They’ve had exposures to the Nipah virus, they’ve had a crisis with dengue, for a brief moment there was even a worry that the plague would re-emerge. So then there was a protocol in place that they immediately went onto. AT: What does that protocol involve? PS: In this instance, a lot of the work of tracking, isolating and surveilling came down to very quick action of the local-level officers in charge of various jurisdictions. Kerala and Tamil Nadu, I would argue, were very clever about thinking about low-resource initiatives — things you could do without relying on stockpiled resources. So there were these low-resource interventions that they went to right off the bat. They were making sure they were taking temperatures of people entering the country, having them give detailed histories of where they had been, and whether there was any contact with someone symptomatic, putting into place isolation and surveillance. They may not have masks or ventilators, but they have people. And so they’ve made them into health census takers. They’ve made them into track-and-trace investigators. Into people who stand in airports taking temperatures. They’ve taken the resource that they have and put it to good use. And quickly shutting down schools, preventing mass gatherings, closing markets — those kinds of interventions also kept infections low. And they were done much before the government was doing it in any other part of the country. AT: What made that kind of effort possible? PS: In both Kerala and Tamil Nadu there is a long history of deeply penetrated political parties that can carry political will down to the local level. And there’s a deep understanding between the administrative arm and the political arm to work together. That dynamic is very different in the weaker-performing states in India. There you have political parties that are largely defined by their ethnic bases of support, which are often derived from distinct caste bases of support. And they are at loggerheads with a bureaucracy that’s largely upper-caste, and doesn’t have a good listening relationship with the political arm. AT: How does having more caste- and ethnicity-based support change politics in a crisis like this? PS: Very early on, Kerala started to have the feeling of a class-based dynamic, in which what is to be discussed is: “How do we create a solid welfare state? How do we come to an understanding about the basics of society that everybody needs?” Which is very different from when you think about politics as “It’s my group now in power, how can I use this time to enrich my group and help my group get ahead?” Which also means when your group gets out of office, the other group can come in and redistribute to itself. AT: Politics as a zero-sum game? PS: If you think about it, that’s in a sense what has happened in the U.S. After the 2016 election, you see this in hyperdrive, a politics of identity now deciding who should and who shouldn’t get the benefits of a state intervention in a time of crisis. Everything that Trump and his team seem to be doing is protecting those that matter to his voting base. There seems to be an idea that these are blue states, with demographics that they don’t need to worry about. Whereas “their” states are going to be fine. That, to me, is identity politics and ethnic politics thinking. The C.D.C. or, you know, the whole chain of people who react — if they’d just been allowed to follow through, I think we would be in a different place. AT: Well, it seems like we’re learning that there has been a lot of hollowing out of those institutions. They don’t have the capacity that they once might have had. PS: Right. But it comes back to this partisan jockeying. There’s been a lot of hollowing out related to that. You know, when I was writing my dissertation on hollowing out the state, people kept asking me, “But why would they do that?” They do it because the driving motivation is a sense of aggrievedness. It’s the idea that “those who should know their place don’t know it any more." And “how dare they come in and build a state that works for everyone’s interests.” So that aggrieved sort of high-status mentality makes you take a hatchet at well-built things, because you think those well-built things will be used for the benefit of the “other.” What you’re saying is you only want them to be used for yourself. Comment
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It's almost as if they believe their primary duty is to the well-being of their constituentsComment
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The major industry of Kerala is training medical staff for export. most of the nurses taking care of me in hospital were from kerala. and as an area it must be every bit as dependent on emigrants remittances as Ireland was for much of the last century. It suggests that the overall standard of education is relatively high, and there is a great respect for medical advice.Comment
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My GP is from KeralaComment
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We're all dying to know, Did it work? Did he successfully kill his parents? Is he going to inherit the house?Comment
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So it wasn't just meComment
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Kuennsberg looking increasingly doused in it
https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1263914317436669955?s=20
https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1263932220391264257?s=20
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I thought his parents lived in a castle rather than a farm? I suppose they own a lot of farmland too.Comment
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Well the downside of creating a society where national wealth is 8 times GDP, and where inheritance is the main means of wealth acquisition, is that you have to worry about your children smothering you in your sleep.Originally posted by ursus arctos View PostComment
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This has got legs, pity the Guardian broke it right now instead of just before a PMQs.Comment
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That martin dickson tweet is gone.Comment
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I would guess that they want the story to build across the weekend media.Originally posted by Walt Flanagans Dog View PostComment
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When is Laura going to stop all this "a source close to number ten" and "a source close to Dominic Cummings" bollocks? Why doesn't she just say "Dominic told me " and "Boris told me" respectively?Comment
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Journalistic convention, but yes.Comment
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Parliament is in recess until 2 June so it will be old news by then.Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
It seems to be building anyway and as with all good gossip stories there are inconsistencies and contradictions emerging - it's gone from the grandparents providing the child care to his sister, and then they didn't actually see the sister anyway. I've seen some suggestion it coincided with his mother's birthday. And the whole thing started with him being reported by a neighbour, who saw him walking around with the child running around near him, which doesn't fit with him being too ill to look after the child.
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Newsnight did lead on the story, to their credit, although no one watches that anymore, I only saw it as the TV got left on that channel after Gardeners World.Comment
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It's coming from the fascists that run the Guido Fawkes blog half the time, apparently.Originally posted by Rogin the Armchair fan View PostComment
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