Dr. Nadine Voelkner: 'We have to start acting like Asians, and quickly too'
Faculty of Arts researcher and Assistant Professor of International Relations, Dr. Nadine Voelkner, spoke with the Dutch newspaper the Algemeen Dagblad (AD) about the novel coronavirus and how governments deal with infectious diseases. (Disclaimer: the interview is in Dutch).
"'The global picture of this pandemic shows that the spread of the virus in Europe is faster than in a number of Asian countries,' says Nadine Voelkner. 'This has everything to do with the experience that Asia had from dealing with the SARS outbreak in 2003, which left deep marks in Hong Kong at the time. Since then, Hong Kong has learned many lessons and invested heavily in information and prevention.' Voelkner, a German, texted this week with a friend in Hong Kong. 'There is no one on the streets,' her friend says. People avoid shops, most people work from home, and everyone wears medical masks. It is only busy in supermarkets and pharmacies. And she washes her hands a thousand times a day, as my friend described it.'"
Read the full interview on the Algemeen Dagblad's website.
About Nadine Voelkner
Dr. Nadine Voelkner is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Arts. She is affiliated with the Groningen Center for Health and Humanities (based at the Faculty of Arts) and Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health. She is currently researching government policy on infectious diseases and places these diseases in a broader context. The emergence and transmission of viruses through contact between humans and animals and how we deal with them also has social and political causes and consequences.
More information
Nadine Voelkner
| Last modified: | 18 March 2020 3.25 p.m. |
More news
-
16 June 2022
Early modern Bible readers were critical and created their own ideal Bible
Findings of research conducted by Renske Annelize Hoff show that publishers of sixteenth-century Bibles added elements to them that connected to an active and diverse readership, such as summaries, maps, and reading plans. In this way, they made...
-
14 June 2022
Culture? Ask young people
How do you involve young people in culture? This is a question that local governments and the cultural sector have struggled with for some time. At the request of the Municipality of Het Hogeland, University of Groningen students carefully...
-
25 May 2022
Ben Feringa Impact Award awarded to Michelle Bruijn and to a student team from the Faculty of Arts
This year, Michelle Bruijn won the Ben Feringa Impact Award of the University of Groningen. Bruijn, assistant professor at the Faculty of Law, won the award in the category for researchers for her research project entitled ‘The Administrative War...