Harambe wrote:
Seyta wrote:
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.
Having an "obedient population" just means that people respect the threat of the virus to them and/or their community and follow the recommendations of public health experts.
This is a good thing, no?
Yes. That is indeed a good thing. But this comes with certain caveats.
For example, let's take Singapore. The citizens are incredibly obedient of the government. And the citizens as a whole, are treated incredibly well. In contrast, migrant workers are treated extremely poorly, to the point that there can be up to a dozen sharing a single room, and they are unilaterally placed under quarantine whenever the government decides an outbreak is occurring among them. As a whole, they are treated in a manner far inferior to the citizens.
During the lockdown, all citizens were allowed to go outside and engage in normal activities with some restrictions in place. Migrant workers in contrast, were placed under a lockdown as strict as China's.
Bluntly speaking, Singaporean Citizens do not care about this. They are fine going about their day-to-day lives, while the migrant workers take the hit from both the quarantine and the virus. Whatever the government deems is best, they go along with.
In the US, this would be the equivalent of taking say, all whites, and allowing them to go about their business. At the same time, a select number of virus-free blacks and hispanics would be manning the fields and essential services, while the rest would be placed under absolute lockdown. If this were to happen, a massive portion of the population would protest the injustice and have it overturned, because that's the type of culture that has been emphasized in half the country over the course of many years. In Singapore, this does not happen. In fact, public protest is generally illegal.
What the West has done is trade-off. The governments do not exist in a way where they can actually force the citizenry to do anything, and as a result, you have large portions of the population continuously spreading the virus. The only time lockdowns even worked was at the very beginning, and that was only because the majority of the population was terrified of the "China Virus". Once it got out that it wasn't as deadly as anticipated, too many people stopped caring for containment to even work.
Authoritarian governments in contrast, can basically take whatever action they want to eradicate the virus. In contrast, the citizens trade away a large number of freedoms. For instance, in China, you have the situation with Muslim minorities being placed in "re-education camps", and in Singapore, it is illegal to protest or demonstrate publicly.
You pretty much need to ask which one you actually want, because they don't coexist.
Look at Germany and France. Even with competent leaders in Merkel and Macron, the outbreak is now running rampant with daily per capita numbers as bad as, or even worse than the US.