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I think so. In the Netherlands at least the discussion seems more nuanced. I’m not sure exactly why because the problems are exactly the same. I suspect there’s a few things at play. 1. The governments communication here is less extreme, and generally more reasonable. A few weeks ago a Dutch restaurant holder announced that he was going to open his restaurants regardless of the lockdown because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to handle it financially. This sparked a lot of debate and at some point, during a press conference, the PM was asked about it. He replied by saying he completely understood what the restaurant holder felt and saw it as a cry for help. He promised he would do anything to help restaurants survive. He wasn’t mad at the restaurant holder, instead, he showed seemingly sincere compassion. It defused the situation. 2. The Dutch government has said many times that everything they do is almost 100% based on their scientific advisory panel. They recently added some economic and behavioral experts to that panel to balance it out and we are slowly moving out of lockdown. Note that the approval rating of the Dutch PM has absolutely skyrocketed during the past couple of months and this makes it much easier to bring the bad news :) 3. There’s this Dutch tradition of late night shows that a lot of people watch. They all have basically the same format and the guests (during the past months) were mostly government people, virologists, doctors, economic experts etc. These shows are interesting in that it's just a few hours of talking, but they have millions of daily viewers. It creates sort of a common reference frame for the discussion to move forward. That restaurant holder for example was a guest that night, and asked to explain why he wanted to open up. 30 minutes of listening to a much more nuanced picture of how this has been for him, his staff and others in the food branch helps understand his motives. Also, because the same table hosts a government representative, a virologist and an ICU doctor you bet the guy had to walk back his earlier statement (at least partially) as it was carefully explained to him how opening up to soon might just make things worse. His position shifted from "I'll open up regardless" to "I'm asking the government for more relief money so we can survive this." I probably oversimplified some stuff, and I'm not sure about these observations at all. There's a lot more at play most likely, anyway, this should give you some insight in how things are going elsewhere. |
(Also are any of the shows you describe in #3 in English? Would love to check them out)