Elites, media, civic and scientific education, and response to Covid-19 in the US and Romania

I compare the response of three major actors, the public, the media, political elites in Romania and the US to the Covid-19 pandemic – a “most different systems design”. In both cases, the cumulative effect of (1) an inappropriate level of scientific and civic education of the public, (2) a dishonest and irresponsible position of a significant part of the media, and (3) the public positions vis-à-vis, and management of, the Covid-19 pandemic by the government have made things much worse than they could have been. The reaction of these actors in the aforementioned countries is in stark contrast to what they were in countries that have done a much better job in managing the pandemic. My paper will also highlight how these actors often learned from one another, not always from the same type of actor, and often in a pernicious way. To give just one example, in mid-July 2020 then-President Donald gave an interview to Chris Wallance on Fox News, where he claimed that the Covid-19 pandemic in the US was getting better. As evidence, he showed a graph where the Case Fatality Rate (the ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases) was going down. Less than a week later, the exact same argument was repeated by a journalist from Antena 3, the functional equivalent of Fox News in Romania. Obviously, both the number of deaths and the number of infections can go up (which they were, in both US and Romania). However, the rate of increase in the former (i.e., deaths) was less than the rate of increase in the latter (cases). Consequently, CFR was going down in both countries.