How Hong Kong got Covid-19 wrong: Juliette Kayyem on her history of crisis management and why it is as much about making disasters less bad as preventing them
- Juliette Kayyem is ‘optimistically realistic’ about the age of disasters we face – the subject of her new book reviewing the handling of catastrophes
- You can’t always prevent a disaster but you can makes its consequences less bad, she says, and faults Hong Kong for not adapting its Covid-19 strategy
The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters, by Juliette Kayyem, pub. PublicAffairs
Flying into combat in a helicopter during the Apocalypse Now movie version of the Vietnam war, Jay “Chef” Hicks asks a fellow soldier why he and his comrades all sit on their helmets. “So we don’t get our balls blown off,” comes the droll reply. Chef lights up with laughter – then soberly takes off and sits on his helmet.
“Preparation for what really matters! The core essence!” exclaims Juliette Kayyem during a video call from her home in Cambridge, in the US state of Massachusetts, at mention of the scene.
The author of The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters – a study of the psychology of our approach, and reaction to, all manner of catastrophes – Los Angeles native Kayyem describes herself as “optimistically realistic”, rather than fatalistic or habitually “just saying bad things are going to happen all the time”.
She also reveals, amid more laughter, “My husband once said to me, ‘You didn’t get the stew gene.’ For some reason I don’t stew. I think that’s genetic; maybe it’s California. ‘We’ve got a problem, let’s fix this! Denial is not an option!’”