NEW YORK, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- The tendency over the last year-and-a-half from leaders, the media and from people all over the United States to repeatedly declare the COVID-19 pandemic over is a reflection of the fact that the country and its people rely far too heavily on technological solutions to this kind of problem, said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong.
Yong made the remarks while giving a sweeping view of the pandemic and the vulnerabilities it exposed as he accepted the University of Chicago's 2022 Benton Award for Distinguished Public Service on Nov. 1 at the Keller Center, home of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, according to the website of the university.
Such solutions tend to flow most quickly to people with resources and power, who "then move on with little care of the gross inequities that are left behind for the people who have to shoulder the brunt of the risk that remains," said the journalist.
"We seem," he noted, "either unwilling or incapable of learning the real lessons, which are that a lot of baseline vulnerabilities need to be addressed to be better at this entire class of problem. This isn't just a thing that we're going to 'tech' our way out of."
"A lot of our policy is geared towards individual action," and "the United States' very strong bent towards individualism harms us in these public health crises," added Yong, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has written a lot on the pandemic. ■
