[culturestate]

> 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.

[throwaway84774]

This doesn't really mesh with the situation on the ground.

I think it does: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?scale=linear&trendline=fals...

[culturestate]

That graph would look much less dramatic if you could plot cases in foreign worker dorms (which have been isolated and are subject to an intense testing and clearance regime[1]) separately from cases in the broader community.

As of yesterday's report[2], dorm cases account for 45,260 of the 48,035 total cases. Incidence in the ex-dorm population is only 0.04%, and fewer than half of those have unknown chains of transmission.

1. Which is, admittedly, a separate issue in and of itself.

2. https://covidsitrep.moh.gov.sg