others countries such as South Korea have had a similar success and they are democracies.
South Korea on Wednesday recorded 731 new cases – the most in more than three months, prompting health minister to declare ‘we are standing at a crossroads’.
www.scmp.com
South Korea on Sunday reported the smallest daily rise in coronavirus infections in three weeks as tighter restrictions cap a second wave.
www.reuters.com
South Korea is coming off a fourth wave of infections, with hundreds of cases a day. Its performance is not comparable to Chinese, Taiwanese, or Vietnamese performance, and more in line with Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan.
East Asia has generally done very well compared to the West; the main reason is because East Asia lived through (and was traumatized by) SARS-1 in 2003 (now
that was a screwup and a nightmare), and thereafter built extremely robust public health and disease control infrastructure.
Post-SARS, the HKSAR, for instance, set up a government-university team to deal with emerging outbreaks, built a giant infectious disease hospital building specifically for major outbreaks, and mandated that every hospital in the territory have wards that could in emergencies be converted to infectious disease wards at a moment's notice, with filters, isolation rooms, and everything. Also, from then on, everyone in the Sinosphere made a habit of wearing face masks when ill or before important exams, when you do not want to get sick.
The masks went on ~January 14 in HK, China, and Singapore - from my East Asian perch, my government mandated temperature checks in all public buildings on Jan 6, 2020, and I started wearing masks on Jan 14 or so.
East Asia had deep reserves of mobilization capacity for such an outbreak, and was on a hair-trigger alert from the start. COVID was big, big news when it broke on New Years' Eve 2019 - the Second Coming of SARS was the panic-driven headline bandied about, and there was rampant speculation as to whether it was transmissible even before the data had rolled in - I know because I told my father to stock up on face masks in the first week of January, before the virus was sequenced, even. It's the West that wasn't paying attention, and it has the gall to toss around claims of a coverup when such a thing was simply not possible, considering the massive media blitz at the time. HKU (a very liberal, very anti-CCP university) sent a team to Wuhan from Jan 2 to Jan 6, and they reported good access and a very bad situation in Wuhan on national television. Of all the things, that convinced me of Chinese good faith. They were trying very hard to maximize transparency the moment they caught wind of the outbreak.
www.wsj.com
