Chernobyl and COVID-19

[ndrosen]

I read Midnight in Chernobyl not long ago, and am now seeing uncomfortable parallels to the coronavirus pandemic. Soviet Communism was not precisely the cause of the nuclear accident— screwups can happen under other political and economic systems — but Soviet insistence on industrialization with little concern for environmental issues, and the Soviet culture of secrecy and concealment, contributed to the disaster and to the slowness in admitting what had happened and taking effective action to preserve public heath. The costs of the accident helped bankrupt the Soviet Union, and such things as people’s fears and resentment over being conscripted to help in the cleanup helped discredit the regime.

The COVID-19 pandemic cannot all be blamed on the American political system, or on Donald Trump, but both bear some share of the blame for death rates here being higher than in many other countries, and the response to the pandemic has included borrowing trillions of dollars more, adding to an already bloated and increasing national debt. The parallels are disturbing.