[claudeganon]

I can’t really parse this “article,” which appears to be from a right-wing opinion site, mostly linking tweets from a CNBC anchor.

Taiwan and South Korea being random seems a spurious claim. Taiwan’s Vice President is an epidemiologist invested with a great deal of executive authority in dealing with public health crises and has guided the country’s response from the outset. South Korea was trending in a quite bad direction with the church outbreaks and quashed them through massive interventions in testing and mobile hospital capacity. And neither country has mass-scale lockdowns like the west (because they didn’t need them).

[mikem170]

Taiwan and South Korea also had first hand experience with SARS, and were much better prepared for COVID. Mask wearing was already a thing there, they had supplies, and they had contact tracing in place and ready to go. They did a good job with this.

Other countries can invest in the same readiness. It's always a decision of limited resources and many opportunity costs (poverty, infrastructure, climate, security, etc).

Different countries with different experiences and difference cultures will make different decisions. That's ok, that's how it should work. Can't have it any other way in a democracy, right?

[claudeganon]

> Different countries with different experiences and difference cultures will make different decisions. That's ok, that's how it should work. Can't have it any other way in a democracy, right?

Sure, but both South Korea and Taiwan are wealthy liberal democracies. I know this isn’t your intention, but a lot of commentators seem to appeal to some kind of Western exceptionalism, completely refusing the examples of SE Asia democracies as a valid measure of comparison. To me, that seems like insanity, because again, they’re also wealthy liberal democracies and have had the best-in-class responses thus far.