Reasons for Asia-Pacific Success in suppressing COVID-19
Acknowledgment: I thank my co-editors John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Shun Wang, Lara B. Aknin, and Senior Manager of the World Happiness Report, Sharon F. Paculor, for sage guidance and advice. Special thanks to our premier data partner Gallup, Lloyd’s Register Foundation for access to the World Risk Poll dataset and Sarah P. Jones for her support through the ICL-YouGov Behaviour Tracker and COVID datahub. I also thank my Special Assistant, Juliana Bartels, and the team at the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, Savannah Pearson, Jesse Thorson, and Meredith Harris.
One of the keys to human well-being is the ability of societies to confront urgent societal challenges. Societal crises demand pro-sociality: the ability of societies to work harmoniously and rationally towards common objectives. In the case of COVID-19, the most dramatic global peacetime crisis since the Great Depression, pro-sociality is required at all scales of interactions. Individuals must abide by pro-social behaviors, such as physical distancing and wearing face masks. Governments must attend to human needs of the most vulnerable citizens. And nations must cooperate with each other in order to bring the global pandemic to a halt.
COVID-19 has exposed many acts of heroism, notably among front-line workers and healthcare workers who have battled the disease at great peril to their own safety, often without the benefit of even rudimentary personal protective equipment (PPE). Yet COVID-19 has also exposed the shortcomings and outright failures of pro-sociality in many countries, including many of the richest countries, for which lack of material resources is not an issue. This paper explores the differences in pro-sociality between the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, where the pandemic was effectively contained to low levels of community transmission, and the countries of the North Atlantic region, where community transmission and excess mortality have been extremely high throughout the course of the pandemic.
Perhaps the most notable variation across world regions of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the far lower mortality rate (deaths per million) in the Asia-Pacific region (northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and Oceania) compared with the North Atlantic region (the US, Canada, the UK, and the European Union).[1] Both regions are home to temperate-zone, urbanized, and developed economies and are broadly comparable in economic structure. Yet, the death rates were vastly lower in the Asia-Pacific than the North Atlantic in every quarter of 2020 and in January 2021, the most recent month at the time of completing this paper (Table 1). In January 2021, for example, the countries of the North Atlantic region had an unweighted average of 7.6 deaths per day per million population, while in the Asia-Pacific region, the unweighted average was a mere 0.18 deaths per day per million population, 42X lower than the North Atlantic.
The Asia-Pacific success in suppressing the pandemic has been consistent since last spring. On April 8, 2020, I wrote the following:[2]
East Asian countries are outperforming the United States and Europe in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the fact that the outbreak began in China, to which the rest of East Asia is very closely bound by trade and travel. The US and Europe should be learning as rapidly as possible about the East Asian approaches, which could still save vast numbers of lives in the West and the rest of the world.
The main sources of the successes of East Asia, and more broadly the Asia-Pacific, were also discernible at an early stage. The Asia-Pacific countries, in contrast with the North Atlantic, were actively engaged in a wide range of intensive Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), including tight border controls; quarantining of arriving passengers; high rates of face-mask use; physical distancing; and public health surveillance systems engaged in widespread testing, contact tracing, and quarantining (or home isolation) of infected individuals. I also document such differences across the two regions in a companion paper.[3]
The successes of the NPIs in the Asia-Pacific region reflected both the leadership of governments and the strong support of the public for the government's bold leadership. The Asia-Pacific successes were both top-down, with governments setting strong control policies, and bottom-up, with the general public supporting governments and complying with government-directed public health measures.