Repost: One of these things is not like the other…

Originally posted on June 15, 2021. Reposted without any edits.

Thus past Sunday, June 13, 2021, The Guardian published a fairly lengthy piece on the present flare-up of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia, in particular among native and migrant factory workers¹. The piece in general is laudatory, describing at times truly atrocious conditions and circumstances faced by factory workers in Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia, though perhaps unsurprisingly it is rather heavy on human interest and fairly light on actual data. Still, one would have generally let this sort of thing pass, and move on with one’s existence while tut-tutting the drastic social and economic inequality inherent in a capitalist economy which we have now successfully globalised…

…except.

In paragraph four, the piece suddenly mentions Vietnam, specifically to point out that there, total cases have now tripled since the start of May, “partly” due to outbreaks in factories.

There are no mentions of Vietnam anywhere else in the 23-paragraph piece. All the human interest stories, all external quotes, literally all but a single sentence of the entire article deals with Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia. We are left to infer that things must be very much the same in Vietnam, since it is mentioned in the same breath – once – as the other three countries, but no further details or specifics are given.

It is at this juncture that I decided to do what staff writers at The Guardian are nearly always incapable of doing, and spend all of 15 seconds on the Internet looking at the figures. Specifically, the most recent set of pandemic statistics for the four countries mentioned from Worldometers². The table below displays the results as of today:

One of these things is not like the other indeed…

Here, I am willing to take the rather charitable view that The Guardian‘s inclusion of Vietnam into the article was driven purely by the tripling of its COVID-19 cases since early May, otherwise known as the “wow factor”, and not by some darker motive having to do with its ostensibly socialist government. Moreover, I am also willing to concede that The Guardian might simply not have anyone on the ground in Vietnam to solicit any human interest stories, and in any event the piece is already running at 23 paragraphs.

Still – even with the tripling of infections, is there not a massive difference in epidemiological statistics between Vietnam and the other three countries cited? Might this not have been clarified in the article to some extent? Should Vietnam have even been included into the piece in the first place – after all, Thailand’s cases have nearly tripled since early May, and have risen by more than six times since early April, why not mention that³?

Perhaps I am being too charitable. After all, leaving Vietnam out would…leave it out, whilst presenting a more detailed comparison of the four countries in the piece might have led to some uncomfortable questions regarding why precisely did the epidemiological performance of the three capitalist countries on the list differ so much from the one that oriented towards socialism. Surely this was not the angle The Guardian‘s editors had been looking for with this particular piece…

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1. Ratcliffe, R., Srey, V., “Factory workers making goods for the west bear brunt of virus surge in south-east Asia”, The Guardian, June 13, 2021, retrieved June 14, 2021.[↩]
2. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries, retrieved June 15, 2021.[↩]
3. This is still from Worldometers. The Guardian, apparently, could not be bothered to mention it, in a piece about the epidemic in Thailand, of all things…[↩]