What the world has learned about facing covid-19
Many countries are ill prepared
SPEAKING FROM his home in Abuja, Chikwe Ihekweazu, the director general of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control, says China has one big lesson to teach the world about covid-19: “It can be contained.” Mr Ihekweazu was in voluntary self-isolation following a visit to Wuhan, the city at the centre of the Chinese outbreak, as part of a group of experts dispatched by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to examine the country’s measures to stop the spread of covid-19.
These measures seem to have had significant success. On February 4th China recorded 3,887 new cases. On March 4th the number was 139. The report that the WHO group published on February 28th put the good results down to the way that the state had used manpower and technology to implement quarantine meticulously on an unprecedented scale. It did not go into the disturbing mechanisms of state power employed to that end.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "New world curriculum"
From the March 7th 2020 edition
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