"It is abundantly clear.."

"It is abundantly clear that East Asia has managed the Covid-19 crisis far better than the West. So what is behind this glaring differential?"

“One of the major differences in terms of casualties is whether [governments] acted promptly,” said Dr. Kenji Shibuya, a professor of Population Health at London’s Kings College. “In the UK it took nearly six weeks, and so it did in the US. It is a timing lesson.”

" But across East Asia, bar some vacillations in Japan, leadership has largely been on point in terms of consistency of strategy and following the lead of experts. “There is no back and forth, like there was [in the US and elsewhere] on masks, there were consistent messages about the dangers.”

“The leadership, in general, has been less politicized and more effective in the East than in the West,” added Dr. Ogan Gurel, a non-practicing American neurologist who has been monitoring the pandemic from South Korea. “Name calling and blaming and deflecting responsibility seemed inappropriate.”

"Conversely, East Asian leaders have set examples.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is frequently filmed wearing a mask and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe even wears his in the Diet. Korean officials, including President Moon Jae-in, are frequently filmed wearing yellow disaster-management jackets."

"Taiwan not only reacted with great speed, it provided an early gold standard for contact tracing, having integrated its health insurance, immigration and customs databases, then mined the resultant big data with AI."

“In Korea, you get these screening exams that are incredible, you get a CT, a dental exam, a blood-test — everything in one morning! It is assembly-line, ultra-efficient,” said Gurel. “In a lot of Western systems, the medical care is advanced but the integration is not.”

"And integration is essential when it comes to effectively deploying the 3Ts.

“The process all has to work together. In America, they say ‘We need more testing,’ but testing without tracing and treatment is meaningless,” he said, noting, most particularly, the weakness of tracing in the US. “You learn this in Med School 101.”

Oh wait! That's not a hallucination! Can you ever forgive me?

https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/why-east- ... 19-part-2/

 

When you forego human rights and privacy there's quite a lot that can be done. Asians generally don't care about those things or more accurately, they're not legally allowed to protect any of that information.

Yes, ideally if we could have FORCED everyone into their homes for as long as the govt deemed fit or face extreme punishments and quarantine people into secret compounds, trace all their contacts and publish all that information so everyone could see it, it would be much easier to control such an outbreak. Then again, we wouldn't be free people either.