Triumph of Discord

When the Corona crisis hit Europe, it looked like science would finally prove it could beat the dark ages. The times in which Pieter Brueghel the Elder had painted this picture would never come back. Some people started dreaming of governments of experts. We saw scientists side-by-side with politicians and they would bring humanity back to salvation. 

Not quite. Meanwhile, we know it didn't quite work as expected. Instead of collaborating, the national states closed borders and presented their own doctors and rulers as expert-heroes in matters of Covid-19. There was no good reason to close the borders in Europe. The European Commission could have imposed the same measures in equally-hit neighbouring states. By turning the pandemics into a national problem, the national states started fighting for their own deliveries of mouth masks. The news media started comparing the national states statistic numbers and tried to make clear that this or this government was doing a bad job. 

The problem is: you can't compare absolute numbers of countries that are totally different in number of inhabitants, surface, people density etcetera. Moreover, the statistics were collected in many different ways and therefore incomparable. So in some way, the winner of the corona crisis was not science, but discord.