Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Tuesday, September 8th,

and this is your F.T. news briefing.

Here in the US and much of the West,

it's been almost six months since we went into various forms of lockdown.

Six months since nearly everything in our lives was cancelled. Many of us started working from home,

if we're lucky to still have a job. So to mark this

milestone we're doing something a little different today on the briefing. We'll talk

to the F.T.'s Jillian Tet and Hannah Cushler about how the pandemic has changed the global economy and the

medical industry in such a short amount of time.

We start with Jillian Tett, our U.S. editor at large, who points out the pandemic has led to finger-pointing and animosity as people try to place blame on the origins of the virus.

Meanwhile, race has clearly played a factor in how different communities have been affected by the pandemic.

We'll get to that, but before we examine the human element, I started by asking Gillian about government responses.

Well, I think what's become very clear is that although you need politicians to give you a reassuring message and to play some kind of cheer leader role in a crisis,

there's a tremendous value to being simply competent and organized and able to execute policies.

And frankly, many and frankly many government figures have been shown wanting in that respect. A country like Germany has done a commendable job by simply being quietly efficient, organized, not making a great drama about it, but essentially the population, you know, being pretty compliant, you go to a country like Italy, which was chaotic at first or the UK which was also chaotic where

essentially Boris Johnson denied that it was a real problem for a long time and then did a U-turn

or the US which frankly is one of the more shameful examples on the

world's Asia day in terms of handling or mishandling the COVID-19 crisis and so

all of those are essentially being found wanting or most of them have

whereas if you look across to much of Asia there's been an infinitely more calm

organized and frankly more impressive response.

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