East Asian countries are beating the Coronavirus while Western countries are struggling to control it even after 9 months. Recently a current US administration official even said “We are not going to control the pandemic” effectively surrendering to the virus. The reason for the stark difference in controlling the pandemic between the East Asian and Western countries are many to say the least. Below is an excerpt from an article at the state-run China Daily:

So what is the secret of China’s recovery, and are there lessons for other economies as they continue to struggle to control the disease itself?

As the first country to confront the crisis, China was the first to be forced to adopt measures to contain it at a time when some leaders elsewhere in the world were confidently predicting it would not affect them.

The Chinese measures included stringent lockdowns and controls on movement, part of a response coordinated by the country’s centralized epidemic response system.

Memories of the SARS epidemic of 2002 had prepared the public for the strict measures needed to combat the new disease. Other countries with longer times to prepare for it delayed their response and allowed emerging infections to run out of control.

“Commitment to the greater good is engrained in the culture,” according to Gregory Poland, head of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, referring to the Chinese response.

“There is not the hyper-individualism that characterizes parts of the US and has driven most of the resistance to the countermeasures against the coronavirus,” medical journal The Lancet quoted him as saying.

In China and other Asian countries, measures such as mask-wearing were accepted as common sense rather than topics for political debate.

A study co-authored by Xi Chen of the Yale School of Public Health calculated that swift measures taken by China in February may have prevented 1.4 million infections and 56,000 deaths.

Ironically, it is those countries that were reluctant to shut down normal activities for fear of the economic impact that are now paying the greatest economic price.

Source: Some struggling to learn pandemic lessons,  China Daily

With that said, I came across the below video at The Journal that discussed why East Asia is winning and the West is losing the fight against the virus: