World
Europe and U.S. Lack Key Weapon Against Pandemic: Experience
Unlike Asia and Africa, western governments didn’t have plans and teams ready for the pandemic.
A tram driver is silhouetted at a tram stop in front of a billboard showing medical workers wearing masks in Hong Kong in 2004.
Photographer: Samantha Sin/AFP via Getty Images
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As Italy overtook China on Thursday to become the deadliest center of the coronavirus, it exposed an uncomfortable truth for the rest of Europe and the U.S.
Why more people should die in a country more than 20 times smaller has multiple answers, but there’s one cause that stands out: a sheer lack of experience with pandemics.