Purely anecdotal but I was in Costa Rica in September of 2020. I was struck by the difference and better preparedness compared to the US.
Every store and place of business had not only signs and hand sanitizer at the entrance, nobody was in stores without masks, and I drove by a line of people over half a mile long and 3-4 people deep, of people waiting in line for hours to get vaccinated.
The taxi driver told me there was some program to provide vaccines to CR and what he did was stay in line and hold the place for his family for awhile and then they would wait in line allowing him to work for awhile. Overall they took public safety measures much more seriously than the US, but I was in a wealthier urban area, don’t know how it was in the rural areas.
I never considered CR being third world.
A lot of countries in South America had very strict rules. Double-mask requirements, mandatory vaccines, stay-at-home days. What they perhaps lacked in access to vaccines, they tried to make up with those stricter rules. They also made deals with China & Russia for their vaccines, in lieu of limited access to Pfizer etc.
Some would argue a healthier dose of common sense.
A better term would be “developing nations” . The term " third world" refers to not being part of NATO (or not aligned to NATO), and is outdated. Also, there are various sorts of developing countries, richer, poorer, and some are war or conflict zones.
Yes, “developing nations” best describes countries without free healthcare, decent consumer protection, or reasonable public transport, let’s stick with that
Me, from the USA:
That would mean Brazil is not a developing nation, but USA is.
Woooosh
In Brazil, Bolsonaro denied it was a thing and fight any measure trying to curb its impact. State governments, who admin the healthcare systems on their States, could see that covid were fucking up the Healthcare system and had to fight the federal government to do anything. A lot of people died, and that mf almost got re elected.
MF got elected after saying his son is too educated to date a black woman, in a country with a very large black population. How does anything else he did surprised you? The day he got elected I quit my job and moved to another country.
Each one in a different way.
Speaking to a couple international students from Nigeria a while back - very poorly.
The conspiracy theories were rampant. Especially in the more tribal / rural areas.
Death everywhere.
Having looked at this table, it would seem that western countries are at the top of the list when sorted by deaths per million.
However, I don’t think the poor countries even had the resources to collect realistic statistics nor the will to report them honestly. I would only use this table for comparing similar pairs of countries against each other. Comparing wealthy contents with poor ones doesn’t appear to make much sense.
My guess is that poor countries handled it badly, and these statistics don’t even begin to tell how bad it was. Then again, what can you expect when you don’t have many hospitals, nor the money for vaccinating everyone.
There’s a lot of guesswork here which could be avoided by not contributing the things you do not know.
There was a programme in place to provide vaccinations to developing countries, so they didn’t get left behind. Not all developing countries lack in hospitals or space, nor did it cost much to vaccinate when the doses were provided for free.
I don’t disagree with anything you suggested, and I will also add, that smaller countries probably had a lot less international travel, and the especially rural parts probably don’t see many outsiders at all, so they may have just avoided most of it by hiding in plain sight.
The western countries don’t even have realistic statistics.
The estimates for deaths per million are vastly different than confirmed deaths per million. After 2021-22 we basically stopped testing.
- High level government employees got vaccines from richer countries
- Rich people got their names added to the high level employees list
- Social distancing and telling everybody “good luck”
- Third world situations tend to weed out immuno-compromised humans fairly efficiently. So long as the higher humans survive, command and control below management level typically has 2-3 backup employees ready to take the chair.
Source: My brain and the random memories that survived the memory hunger games.
In Colombia the rich part of my family went to Florida to get vaccinated. I think one of the things that radicalized me was seeing the absurd inequality on my own family since I was a child.
