Malaysia looks like a complete basket case. That is until you recall that we were seeing over 1,000 covid deaths a day in the UK in both April 2020 and January 2021. They have just hit 100 a day for the first time. We had a thousand more deaths in one week in January alone than Malaysia has had in the entire crisis. Their health minister called the 100 daily death threshold a dark day for his nation; we passed 100,000 total deaths with hardly a blink of the eye. Our death toll is twenty times theirs, though their population is only half ours. It turns out we’re the basket case, despite having the sixth highest GDP in the world, eight times theirs. How easy to condemn the dysfunctional politics of a developing nation half a world a way. How hard to take ourselves to account.
Last modified: 13 July 2021
