ASEAN's CoronaControl Meets US & UK's CoronaSlaughter

Reputable scientists want to hold the criminally negligent Trump and Johnson accountable... but whither ASEAN?

With a blog subtitle featuring the words "elegant despair," I have primed you, dear reader, not to expect feelgood stories on this blog. Today, however, there may be some reason to hope that countries whose leadership is not criminally negligent actually can do something about the harms caused by COVID-19. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been faring rather better than one would expect given their development status. The contrast is especially remarkable when compared to the examples of criminal negligence you observe in the US and UK [1, 2], which I have already written about at length. To cut a long story short, from ASEAN Economic Community News Today:

With some wealthy Western countries doing quite appallingly, calls for accountability are growing. One highly regarded scientist recently postulated on Twitter that “Nuremberg-style trials for accountability” should be held for leaders of countries that recorded more than 10 deaths per one million population.

“A nation with more than 100 deaths per million population was catastrophically unsuccessful”, said Professor Richard H. Ebright, a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the prestigious Rutgers University, and a Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology.

Lest you think it's the bloc's wealthiest countries that are faring the best--Malaysia and Singapore--it appears that its most recent and least developed members which are confronting COVID-19 the best. Granted, the likes of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam [CLMV] do not have anywhere near as many international travel links, but you would think their less advanced healthcare systems would be less able to cope with outbreaks. Yet, just as the supposedly "developed" US and UK rank first and third in the global league table of COVID-19 fatalities, these CLMV countries have escaped the brunt of the disease:

Replying to an email from AEC News Today, Professor Ebright said that “it is striking that every nation in the [Southeast Asian] region, from richest to poorest, appears to have done so well compared to the US, UK, and EU (subject to caveats about low testing rates in Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar)”.

While CLMVT government leaders are coming under increasing pressure to ease international travel restrictions, most are standing firm in maintaining hard borders as they continue returning citizens from around the world. Some have put in place entry processes designed to ensure that only those people who *really need to enter* are doing so.

Now, ASEAN members have huge variations in any factor you can name--geography, population, religion, wealth, economic and political systems. According Dr. Ebright, though, it's not whether your country is an autocracy or a democracy that appears to matter in confronting COVID-19, which couldn't care less about humans, their politics or ideologies. What really matters, then?

Discussing the success and failure of nations in combating the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Professor Ebright said, “nations that [had] successfully suppressed [the] outbreak include both small and large, both island and non-island, and both autocratic and democratic. The “sole relevant parameter for success or failure is whether governments took prompt resolute action (success) or whether it did not (failure).

“In nations where travel controls were (1) promptly implemented and (2) promptly expanded to include emerging zones of infection, travel controls were extremely effective in suppressing the outbreak”, he said, adding that “a fast and strong response by government equals success. A slow and weak response by government equals failure”.

I don't want to laud ASEAN members' achievement too much lest I jinx our region. Suffice to say, if the pseudo-Christian Trump actually read the good book instead of holding it up like a piece of meat, COVID-19 appears to be turning over the league tables not just within ASEAN but in the rest of the world -

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.