Andrew Fidal

Hey! I'm Andrew Fidal and I'm from Egypt. I'm a first-year undergraduate student at Macalester College and I have always been really interested in geography and public health!

Excerpt from my pandemic journal, Wednesday, November 25th

Today I was put in my first choice which was international role models. This theme focuses on how different countries handled the coronavirus pandemic and there will be comparisons between countries like China and New Zealand who were very successful in handling the pandemic and countries that handled the situation poorly like the United States. Today, I want to give my personal overview of this topic. China, New Zealand, and, the US all have similar resources and so they are technically all capable of doing the same thing like being able to control the virus.

I also claim that New Zealand is culturally/politically similar to the US in the fact that they all have hundreds of different ethnicities, a lot of people from all over the world migrating there and so the people’s mindsets should be similar. Of course, there will be research about this but at least that’s what I think right now. I agree in a country like China, the government has much more control over the people, and the lockdown there is strictly followed and people rarely break protocols and that would be more difficult to achieve in a country like the US. These are just some of the things I was thinking about and wanted to write down right after I got this topic for the final project.