COMMENT | Covid-19: Nothing to learn from East Asia?

COMMENT | Covid-19 infection and death rates in the Western world and many developing countries in Asia and Latin America have long overtaken East Asia since the second quarter of 2020.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering prevailing Western accounts of the Asian financial crises, there have been no serious efforts to draw policy lessons from East Asian contagion containment.

Although most East Asian economies have successfully contained the pandemic without nationwide ‘stay in shelter lockdowns’, many governments have seen such measures as necessary. But lockdowns are blunt measures, with inevitable adverse consequences, especially for businesses and employment.

Many countries have thus imposed lockdowns, citing China’s response in Wuhan. But as the first World Health Organization (WHO) fact-finding mission to China noted, “The majority of the response in China, in 30 provinces, was about case finding, contact tracing and suspension of public gatherings - all common measures used anywhere in the world to manage (infectious) diseases.

Lockdowns were limited to a few cities where contagion went “out of control in the beginning”...