What did they do right? First, they ramped up testing as soon as they were able to, to devise a test for this new coronavirus coming out of Wuhan, China. Taiwan's total death toll from COVID-19 stands at 11. Taiwan and South Korea spring to mind, but there were others that avoided the really very high excess mortality of, well, now more than half a million people that we've witnessed in the United States. Niall Ferguson: Well, we know that there was a better way because there were countries much closer to China that handled it far better. What should, honestly, we've been at this for 14 months now, and I myself reading as much as I try to read to stay, I'm not quite clear, I don't even, I don't have a crisp idea aside from your argument which I'm going to ask you to put, a crisp idea of what they ought to have done. One is of the public health bureaucracy and the other's of the press. In truth, what happened was a disastrous failure of the public health bureaucracy at the Department of Health and Human Services, and particularly at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a subject much less discussed in the press. "Doom", on events a year ago this spring: It was all a circus in which journalists and Trump made believe that it was all about him. And you described the response in this country and in Britain, of course, we'll spend most of our time in this country, as a straightforward failure. But you have some very sharp things to say, particularly about public health officials. Peter Robinson: Reassuring taking the very long view. And so, in a way, "Doom" is a kind of reassuring, comforting, and at times I find even amusing book. And part of what I do is to show that, by historic standards, COVID-19 is not a really massive disaster.
I wanted to write the book to put our current or recent disaster into some kind of historical context.
Part of the point of this book is to explore our very strange ambivalent relationship to doom, which fascinates us and often leads us to exaggerate the scale of a disaster. the US edition depicts a golfer sinking a putt with a wildfire raging behind him. Niall Ferguson: Well, there's a certain irony in there, which I think the dust jacket also makes clear. The author of more than a dozen works of economics, military history, and diplomacy, Professor Ferguson has just published "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe". A fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, Niall Ferguson has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, the Stern School of Business, the London School of Economics, and Harvard. Now that it all may finally be ending, how did it happen? The historian Niall Ferguson in his new book "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe", on "Uncommon Knowledge" now. Peter Robinson: A worldwide plague, the American economy shut down, schools closed, masks, social distancing.
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