Yes, China was very successful at containing the outbreak by welding the ill into their apartment buildings. Australia and New Zealand had the benefit of their rather extreme isolation from the rest of the world. India looked like it was doing great til it wasn't.
Seems like China's policy and Taiwan's policy are the only nations that have clear success. And it's the zero tolerance of COVID policy. One that many of us have been calling for near 2 years now.
> The only success stories with this strategy are Australia and New Zealand, which are island nations completely isolated from anywhere else.
Taiwan is another such success story (7 deaths total, zero domestic cases for over 200 days) and it's not exactly that isolated from, well, the place where the pandemic started.
China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all have lower infection rates than we do, and one of their biggest ways of controlling it has been masks. Taiwan in particular has never had more than a few cases and they are near neighbors to the epicenter of this whole thing. They controlled it by cutting off travel and using masks and they've never had to do a shut down.
Underrated comment. NZ, AUS, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea. Most of the countries doing well have dealt with bird flu, SARS, etc in the recent past. Shouldn't surprise people they reacted quickly and got it under control. They had plenty of practice.
of course the problem is there are no good counter examples?
except maybe japan and south korea? maybe thailand?
and they're not nearly as successful at containing covid19 as china and vietnam.
of course there are small countries that have done it too.. nz, sg..
yes taiwan is somewhere in the middle of that.
but there's really nothing else quite like china and vietnam?
Sure, what about Taiwan? Is there anything that Taiwan did which was significantly different from what South Korea or Singapore did to prevent the wide spread of the virus?
> With the exception of Singapore (which put an Australian in charge of its response), Asian countries that were hit hard by SARS or MERS responded swiftly and decisively: Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and China crushed the virus.
This doesn't really mesh with the situation on the ground.
Singapore has done about as well as they reasonably could given the dorm outbreak. Ex-dorm community cases are still quite low, and we're mostly business as usual. No idea who this Aussie you're talking about is, either.
South Korea is constantly battling new flareups, and Hong Kong has effectively gone back into lockdown as of today with an exploding caseload.
The only one of those countries that can really be said to have "crushed it" is Taiwan, which is probably due in part to being a self-sufficient island and in part to the extreme level of skepticism with which they treat anything from the mainland government.
The success of countries like New Zealand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Australia is widely attributed stringent border control, localized quarantine and mass testing when outbreaks occur.
I haven't seen any suggestions that the region has a higher acquired immunity to coronaviruses. And other countries in the region (Japan, Indonesia, India and China) had high numbers of infections and fatalities.
Several countries were highly effective at controlling it, and had far lower death tolls as a consequence.
These countries are very diverse in many respects, so one can't claim that they only succeeded due to some particular quirk they share in common: China, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, and others.
> Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea aren't under lockdown, they're stopping the spread by just having good testing and case tracking capacity, and good hygiene.
You forgot Taiwan, who is faring much better than all three of the countries you mentioned.
I will here simply point you to the countries which have had great success combating this epidemic, such as Singapore and Taiwan. They exercise strict quarantine of infected (note, not uninfected) individuals plus contact tracing.
> This is not the simplest answer, and the evidence that the measures have really slowed spread is extremely low except in places like New Zealand and Australia which are small islands in Oceania.
Have you ever heard of this small Asian country called CHINA?
This interesting and really shows the power of social distancing. I believe this is also why China/Korea/Taiwan/Singapore were able to overcome the disease. The virus doesn’t spread well without close contact.
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