Martha Lincoln discusses the contribution of exceptionalism and hubris to the poor responses to COVID-19 by Brazil, Chile, the United Kingdom and the United States (Nature 585, 325; 2020). In my view, the political orientations that colour her inferences seem oversimplified.
Reported COVID-19 cases and deaths vary with countries’ testing capacity, their age distributions and population risks. Political factors, too, subvert data quality. For example, among countries that seem to have contained the virus, Cuba and Vietnam have authoritarian socialist regimes that control the handling of information (the two rank 171 and 175, respectively, out of 180 countries in terms of press freedom; see go.nature.com/3jhywwy).
Lincoln implies that hubris and poor outcomes are associated with right-wing government. But the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is left of the political spectrum, also dismissed social distancing and delayed quarantine and testing.
As Lincoln points out, exceptionalism and hubris are hard to define. For example, the United States after its withdrawal of funding to the World Health Organization, and Britain after Brexit, will remain more internationally involved than Cuba or Vietnam. And, unlike the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil, Chile did not play down the threat of the virus (see M. A. Benítez et al. Health Policy Technol.; in the press). Yet its outcome has been poor, perhaps because Chileans have lost trust in democratic institutions.
