One of the many paradoxes of the coronavirus pandemic crisis was to produce an historic retrenchment of states within national borders: governments closed off entries and exits while opening up a wave of comparisons of national strategies, policies and performance in the battle against this virus. Never before had there been so much sudden interest in comparing expert recommendations, political responses and the health statistics compiled on a daily basis. In a matter of weeks, by March 2020, our daily lives became saturated with infection and death rates and measures of hospitalizations and intensive care beds. To be sure, not all countries were on a level playing field in terms of health care infrastructure or even statistical capacity to measure the real impact of the COVID-19. The degree of exposure to the virus also varied tremendously over space and time, but it did not seem to matter much to the mediasphere, social networks or other databases that fed us on a continuous and gigantic flow of information and statistics throughout 2020. Comparisons were also meant as a form of benchmarking between countries, sometimes with heavily moral evaluations. Because the advanced Western welfare states were hit early on and quite severely, they remained more evidently in the spotlight, but comparisons were commonly made with countries such as Taiwan, Israel, South Africa or Peru in various regions of the world. As a consequence, the pandemic expanded our horizons on the one hand while narrowing them drastically on the other because of border closings and local quarantines or lockdowns.

Another striking characteristic of this crisis was the blending of scientific, political and popular judgements about the pandemic and the various national responses it triggered. In its magnitude, it became the first global event during the era of digital media and social networks to so intensely affect people's daily lives in so many countries at once. Previous pandemic flu episodes of a similar nature during the 1950s and 1960s mostly went under the radar, in spite of estimated mortality that was significant. In 2020, the situation was very different: digital media and networks became a springboard for opinions of all kinds blended together.