Good News

Besides desperately shifting the blame onto the United States, european countries were also trying to imitate Spain and use relatively strict risk-control policies to stop the rampant spread of influenza.

But was copying someone else's homework really so easy? By this point, european countries had a fairly clear answer: not at all.

Even something that looked as simple as sealing the national borders was fraught with difficulties in execution. First came public opinion. There were always some people who opposed a complete border closure, even when the country was already facing a fairly serious crisis.

Even if public opinion supported it, the measure still had to pass votes in institutions such as Congress and Parliament before it could be handed over to the government for implementation.

By the time these orders had been issued to every level of government, at least a week would have passed. Even if the borders were then sealed, it would hardly achieve any good results.

Then there was the centralized quarantine policy that Spain had already implemented on a large scale. This too was enormously difficult for other european countries.

Leaving aside the many Europeans unwilling to quarantine themselves or be placed under centralized quarantine, even if they were willing, setting up temporary quarantine sites and supplying them with materials posed a major problem.

How had Spain solved the problem of material supplies? It had only been accomplished after mobilizing large numbers of troops and having the royal family take the lead in donating supplies.

Carlo had paid as much as 500 million Pesetas for this. For the royal families of other european countries, they were neither willing nor capable of taking out that much money.

Even if some royal families were willing, their governments did not have enough supplies—or rather, lacked the transport capacity