Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
T he citizens of Czechia should be happy that I, their leader, have guided them through the COVID-19 pandemic to the summer of this year with only 224 people having died from the virus. But strangely they are not. Sure, I spent more than the nation’s entire GDP on supporting the economy through my extremely draconian lockdown programme, but so what? It’s really not fair. Now that most of my people are vaccinated, they’re going to kick me out of office.
This is a simple yet somehow terrifying web-based sim called The Corona Game. At the end of it you can see a scatter plot of how others have performed, with axes for death toll and total spending. Turns out some people managed to spend even more than I did and still let 140,000 die. Others spent much less, but a few thousand human beings had to be sacrificed. But then lost money also translates, in indirect ways, into lost lives.