Precious Roy wrote:
Today, in China, Singapore, S. Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan there were 141 new cases of COVID 19 reported. The US will have more new COVID 19 cases this week alone than have been reported in these countries for the entire duration of the pandemic. Economies in these countries are thriving, kids are in school, health care is being delivered unabated and life is not very far off from what it was like before the pandemic.
This is not actually a good selection of countries to use as an example. The reason is that these countries manage the virus by virtue of having a lack of progressive values, and being under authoritarian regimes.
China is the only large country that experienced a significant outbreak and actually eradicated it. The means by which they did so was only possible because the government had unilateral power to impose the strictest lockdown imaginable. Impeding quarantine efforts in Wuhan (hiding symptoms, refusing lockdown, harassing medical personnel) was punishable by death (one execution actually took place because a man stabbed two checkpoint officers while trying to escape the region). It is impossible for this to coexist with a progressive democratic government.
Singapore's government also has near unilateral control, but they actually experienced a horrible sustained outbreak from April - August, with per capita levels far worse than the US or Europe. The reason was that the outbreak took place in the migrant worker quarters of the city, and the government considered them all to be low-risk individuals, and simply let the virus spread through all of them and eradicate itself. Once that was done, things got back to normal.
South Korea effectively manages the virus because its population manages the virus (similar to Japan). If you know anything about South Korean culture, you pretty much know that the population readily shames anyone for being a dissident in any manner. Shaming takes place for things ranging from being overweight, marrying foreigners, showing too much skin, etc. In the case of the virus, celebrities caught skirting virus restrictions were harassed and shamed to high heaven.
Vietnam, like Singapore and China, has an authoritarian government, and effectively combined that with intense Xenophobia early on to prevent the virus from ever taking hold. I'm not sure if you recall, but Vietnamese citizens forcibly demanded complete border closures with China, and Chinese individuals were completely barred from public establishments. They also had military enforcement of quarantines.
Thailand had very much the same response, and is also under authoritarian rule (in case you haven't been aware of the mass protests).
Taiwan is uniquely the only non-Authoritarian regime here, and their success is pretty much a combination of having an obedient population, being an island, and absolutely mistrusting China. Early on, when WHO called on Nations to NOT close borders, Taiwan went ahead and blocked all incoming travel from China. They've effectively never had an outbreak of any significance since then.