I have a theory that cultures that value (and I mean truly value) clean, rational thinking, will be superior in not only reacting to these sorts of crises, but preventing them in the first place.

If one looks very carefully at the nature of most of the discussions taking place in the memeplex on covid-19 and a variety of other hot button topics, one thing you will notice is that there is a breathtaking amount of not just confusion, but delusion. People's internal mental models of the world do not match observable reality - it's been this way for a very long time (well, it's always been this way technically, and always will, to a degree), and it seems to me that it's getting worse at an increasing rate.

I think this is a material problem, I believe it can be observed (manually, and perhaps somehow algorithmically - we have petabytes of data to mine), and I believe something can be done about it. But first, people have to be willing to look.