In October 2019, right before the world got hit by the biggest global pandemic since 1918 (the Spanish flu), a ranking of 195 countries on their preparedness to deal with a global pandemic was published, and the numbers 1 and 2 (top scorers) on it were two countries that turned out actually to be among the world’s worst on dealing with this new coronavirus. #1 was U.S., and #2 was UK. #3 was Netherlands. By contrast, New Zealand, which turned out to have had the best performance among all of the wealthy or high-per-capita-GDP countries, scored only #35 on it, while two of the world’s very best-performing countries at protecting their respective publics from this global pandemic, Vietnam and China, scored respectively #50 and #51, below 49 countries, all of which 49 other countries turned out to have had actually far higher proportions of their respective national populations come down with the disease and die from it.