Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19
Pandemic: What Have We Learned,
Particularly from Asia?

Derek Qi Ren Kok
Jeffrey Sachs Centre on Sustainable Developlment
Sunway University
Kuala Lumpur
derekk@sunway.edu.my

Wing Thye Woo
Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia
Sunway University
Kuala Lumpur

School of Economics
Fudan University
Shanghai

Institute of Population and Labour Economics (IPLE)
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Peking
wtwoo@sunway.edu.my

Abstrakt
The key practices in successful government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are (1) early bor-
der controls to contain the initial spread of the virus from abroad; (2) rapidly increasing the capacity
of national health systems in terms of mobilizing staff, securing supplies (z.B., protective equipment
and respiratory devices), and optimizing space (z.B., ensuring adequate numbers of acute and inten-
sive care beds) to scale up testing-tracing-treating infrastructure; (3) promoting individual hygienic
behavior such as social distancing and face mask use, which requires, jeweils, active government
enforcement of regulations against holding spreader events, and strong government intervention in
the market to ensure adequate supplies; (4) fiscal measures to extend disaster relief to workers, busi-
nesses, and vulnerable populations; Und (5) clear, concise, and consistent communications from leaders
and authorities.
International cooperation must have a key role in the fight against the pandemic. So far, a global re-
sponse to the crisis has been glaringly absent. Although it is understandable that countries prioritize
their own needs, it must be understood that no country is safe until every other country is also safe.
Global access to future vaccines, supplies, tests, and treatments is the only way to ensure the virus is
truly eradicated within a country. The richer countries should establish a global fund to provide the
poor countries with the needed vaccine, and to enhance their efforts in testing, tracing, and treating
COVID-19 cases.

Asian Economic Papers 20:1

Technologie

https://doi.org/10.1162/asep_a_00833

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

1. The need for economic resilience to health shocks

The world ﬁrst woke up to the seriousness of COVID-19 in January 2020; the disease is still
marching relentlessly and getting deadlier across the world in February 2021 when this pa-
per is sent for publication. The total number of deaths worldwide soared from 1 million in
September 2020 Zu 2.5 million in February 2021. The number is expected to increase because
large European countries like France, Italien, Spanien, and Germany are bracing for another
wave (the third wave) of infections, with the appearance of more easily transmitted vari-
ants of COVID-19.1

But COVID-19 is much more than a health crisis. The virus has unleashed socioeconomic
effects that have devastated lives and livelihoods beyond just health, undoing decades of
global progress in ﬁghting poverty, Krankheit, and violence in one year. The unprecedented
extent of socioeconomic damage inﬂicted during peace time by COVID-19 is captured in
Tisch 1, which compares the growth outcomes in the largest economies in North America,
South America, Europa, Asien, and Africa during the global ﬁnancial crisis (GFC) in 2008–09
and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The GDP growth rates (in percent) In 2009 Und 2020
war, jeweils, −2.5 and −3.4 in the United States; −0.1 and −4.5 in Brazil; −2.9 and
−9.0 in France; −5.4 and −9.2 in Japan; and −1.5 and −7.5 in South Africa.

Of these nine large economies in the ﬁve regions, there is only one case (Deutschland)
where the GFC inﬂicted more material damage than COVID-19, and even then only
marginally so, −5.7 percent in 2009 versus −5.4 percent in 2020. More tellingly, nur
one country (China) reported positive growth in 2020. As China is the only country that
had the pandemic under control by July 2020, we can see the clear lesson that success-
ful control of COVID-19 is necessary for production and investment to resume their
normal courses.

Given the fundamental nature of the COVID-19 threat to life and to livelihoods, the Asian
Economic Panel (AEP) mobilized its membership to study this negative public health
shock and come up with recommendations on policy suggestions to strengthen eco-
nomic resilience to future occurrences of this type of shock. This mobilization follows
the AEP tradition of publishing special issues of the Asian Economic Papers (ASEP) von-
voted to understanding important economic developments and large negative shocks,
Zum Beispiel, the Spring/Summer 2003 issue of ASEP analyzed the implications of China’s
full integration into the world economy upon its accession to the WTO in 2001; the Win-
ter 2004 issue explored the impact of the SARS pandemic of 2002–03; the Winter 2009
issue on the GFC sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008; Die

1 In the proof stage of this article, France announced a month-long lockdown of Paris on

18 Marsch 2021.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Tisch 1. Comparing the Output Consequences of the GFC and the COVID-19 pandemic

GFC started in September 2008
2007

COVID-19 pandemic started in
Dezember 2019
2019

2008
−0.1
4.1
2.1
0.3
1.0
9.7
−1.1
7.2
3.2

2009
−2.5
−5.9
−0.1
−2.9
−5.7
9.4
−5.4
8.3
−1.5

2.2
−2.1
1.4
1.5
0.8
6.0
0.3
2.2
0.2

2020 (estimate)
−3.4
−10.4
−4.5
−9.0
−5.4
2.3
−9.2
−3.2
−7.5

USA
Argentina
Brasilien
Frankreich
Deutschland
China
Japan
Nigeria
Südafrika

1.9
9.0
6.1
2.4
3.0
14.3
1.7
7.3
5.4

Quelle: 2007–2009 data are from International Monetary Fund, IMF (2020).

2019–2020 data are from International Monetary Fund, IMF (2021).

Winter/Spring 2012 issue on the middle-income trap phenomenon; and the Fall 2019 Ist-
sue on the U.S.–China trade war.

Diesmal, ASEP is devoting two issues, released simultaneously, to examine the COVID-19
phenomenon. These two issues of ASEP place special emphasis on the experiences of the
Asian economies because the death rates in East and Southeast Asia pale in comparison
with those in the largest European economies and in the United States. Zu diesem Zweck, Das
special edition has convened two groups of papers.

The ﬁrst group of papers are analyses conducted at the global level to enable us to ex-
amine the pandemic’s impact on Asian economies vis-à-vis other economies, wie zum Beispiel ein
East–West comparison of policy responses (Sachs); an evaluation of the global economic
costs of COVID-19 under different scenarios (McKibbin and Fernando); the pandemic’s
effects on international trade (Hayakawa and Mukunoki) and ﬁnancial markets (Azis,
Virananda, and Estiko); and changes to our lifestyle and work behaviors (Okubo, Inoue,
and Sekijima).

The second group of papers are in-depth analyses of select economies: China (Tian; Und
Li, Lu, and Zheng), Japan (Konishi, Saito, Ishikawa, Kanai, and Igei), Malaysia (Khalid),
die Phillipinen (Monsod and Gochoco-Bautista), Südkorea (Lim, Hong, Mou, Und
Cheong), Taiwan (Kuo), and Thailand (Tangkitvanich). We have the largely successful
stories of China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, und Südkorea; and accounts of policy miscal-
culations, missteps, and mistakes in other economies in the continent like the Philippines
and Malaysia.

2. False prophets, and naïve linear projection of recent history

Any discussion over government responses to the pandemic almost always involves de-
bate over whether lockdowns are the appropriate response to combating and containing

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

the virus. Critics of lockdowns hold that stay-at-home orders wield more devastating
consequences than the COVID-19 virus itself. The Great Barrington Declaration typ-
iﬁed this line of thought.2 This proposal argued that lockdown policies would lower
childhood vaccination rates, reduce screening for diseases like cancer, and hurt mental
health—leading to greater excess mortality than without a lockdown. If government ac-
tion is needed at all, it should be limited to those most at risk of death from COVID-19, für
Beispiel, the elderly and people who are immunologically impaired. The uncompro-
mising recommendation is that those with “minimal risk of death”—the majority of the
population—should be encouraged to go about their lives normally and build herd immu-
nity to the virus through natural infection.

The best example of this attitude among public health ofﬁcers is that of Sweden’s chief epi-
demiologist, Anders Tegnell. Sweden refrained from imposing a lockdown and instead
chose to provide its citizens with voluntary social distancing guidelines at its bars, restau-
rants, parks, public transportation, and schools; and even kept its national borders uncon-
ditionally open. This Swedish public health response was starkly different from the other
Nordic countries (Denmark,3 Norwegen, and Finland), as well as different from the over-
whelmingly majority of Western European economies. When it was pointed out to Tegnell
in March 2020 that keeping schools open would risk children infecting the 10 percent of
Swedish population that is aged, his e-mailed response was, “10 percent might be worth
Es?” (Bjorklund 2020).

Sentiments like that of Tegnell and the Great Barrington Declaration were met with strong
responses by most members of the medical community. Zum Beispiel, Alwan et al. (2020),
in a letter to the leading medical journal, Lancet, called the herd immunity proposal “a
dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientiﬁc evidence.” If put into practice, the letter
warned, the approach would not end the COVID-19 pandemic but would instead result
in recurrent epidemics and impose even greater burdens on the economy and health care
System. Außerdem, they argued, although lockdowns were disruptive on mental and
physical health, and the economy, they were essential to buy time to reduce mortality and
establish pandemic response systems. “The evidence is very clear: controlling community
spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and
effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months. We cannot afford dis-
tractions that undermine an effective response; it is essential that we act urgently based on
the evidence.”4

2 The Great Barrington Declaration. 4 Oktober 2020; Verfügbar unter https://gbdeclaration.org.

3 Denmark even violated the terms of its Schengen membership by banning entry of non-resident

foreigners for a month, beginnend 14 Marsch 2020 (Nikel 2020).

4 Tedros Adhanom, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, pointed out that “never
in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an
outbreak, let alone a pandemic” (BBC 2020b). And Anthony Fauci, head of the White House

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

It is interesting to note that the herd immunity option was also the preferred response of
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Donald Trump to the outbreak of
COVID-19.5 We can rule out that the reason that they did so was because it was the po-
litically expedient position to take. If political expediency is the primary determinant
of a leader’s policy choice, then the fact that the overwhelming majority of democrati-
cally elected leaders in Western Europe chose lockdowns instead would mean that lock-
downs, not herd immunity (d.h., “look busy” not “be passive”), are the more politically
expedient choice.6

The likely explanation for why Johnson, Trump, and the signatories of the Great Bar-
rington Declaration rejected the need for compulsory mask wearing, social distanc-
ing, school closing, and border controls is that they were gambling on the COVID-19
pandemic to be in line with recent experiences with other pandemics, the naive projec-
tion of which would suggest that COVID-19 was unlikely to have much impact on the
richest countries.

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Tisch 2 summarizes the health impact of four past pandemics in the 1918–2018 period:
Spanish ﬂu, Februar 1918 to April 1920; severely acute respiratory syndrome (SARS),
November 2002 to July 2003; swine ﬂu, Januar 2009 to August 2010; and Middle East res-
piratory syndrome (MERS), April 2012 to present. These four pandemics could be put into
two groups according to the type of virus that them: the Spanish ﬂu and swine ﬂu were
caused by an inﬂuenza virus, while SARS and MERS were caused by a coronavirus.7

A key feature revealed in Table 2 is that the inﬂuenza virus had been much more deadly
than the coronavirus. The number of global deaths and U.S. deaths were, jeweils, 50
million and 675,000 for the Spanish ﬂu; Und 284,000 Und 12,649 for the swine ﬂu. The U.S.
share of deaths in these two virus groups were 1.35 percent and 4.45 Prozent, jeweils.
For the two previous coronaviruses (SARS and MERS), the number of U.S. deaths was zero
in both cases; and the global number of deaths did not exceed 1,000 in either case. And
because it has been known since January 2020 that this latest respiratory disease is caused

Coronavirus Task Force, called the Declaration “ridiculous,” “total nonsense,” and “very dan-
gerous,” saying that it would lead to a larger number of hospitalizations and avoidable deaths
(Higgins-Dunn 2020).

5 Johnson had told the Italian Prime Minister in March 2020 that the UK was going for the herd im-
munity solution (Payne 2020). And Trump had predicted in early February 2020 that the COVID-
19 disease would be gone in April 2020 (Bump 2020).

6 We can also rule out the reason for Trump’s choice being that he was better informed or more per-
spicacious than the leaders of Western Europe. Trump’s level of (self-proclaimed) genius-ness was
plainly revealed on 24 April 2020, when he suggested that injection of disinfectant and exposure to
ultraviolet light be the treatment for COVID-19 (BBC 2020a).

7 Pitt (2020) is an excellent succinct exposition of the differences between the inﬂuenza virus and the

coronavirus. Also see Centers for Disease Control (2020), and Hewings-Martin (2020).

Asian Economic Papers

Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Tisch 2. Health consequences of selected pandemics

Krankheit

Period

Number of cases
Global

USA

Number of deaths
Global

USA

Respiratory pandemic caused by inﬂuenza virus
Spanish ﬂu (H1N1)

Swine ﬂu (H1N1/09)

Februar 1918 Zu
April 1920
Januar 2009 Zu
August 2010

Respiratory pandemic caused by coronavirus
Severely acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS-CoV)

Juli 2003

November 2002 Zu

Middle East respiratory

syndrome (MERS-CoV)

April 2012 to present
(Dezember 2020)

COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)

November 2019 Zu

present (26-2-2021)

1/3 of global
Bevölkerung

0.7 billion to
1.4 Milliarde

50 Million

675,000

60.8 Million

284,000

12,649

8,439

2,566

118.8 Million
29.3 Million
(2nd and 3rd highest are India and
Brazil at 11.3 million each)

812 (WHO)
774 (CDC)
882 (up to

Dezember
2020)
2.5 Million

0
0
0

0.5 Million

Sources: Center for Disease Control, CDC (2019a and 2019b), Johns Hopkins Universität (2021), World Health Organization, WHO (2020

Und 2021).

by a coronavirus, it was therefore tempting in early 2020 to guess that history would repeat
selbst, and that the COVID-19 infection would not be a big killer. Herein lies the empirical
basis of the willingness of Johnson, Trump, and Tegnell to gamble on the herd immunity
solution to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It turns out, Jedoch, that this time, the deadliness of the COVID-19 type of coronavirus
greatly exceeded that of SARS and MERS. By the end of February 2021, 2.5 million had
been killed worldwide, of which 0.5 million deaths were in the United States alone. Der
United States accounted for 20 percent of global casualties, a proportion that far exceeded
Die 1.35 percent in the Spanish ﬂu and the 4.35 percent in the swine ﬂu.

The high proportion of global deaths in the United States reﬂects the extreme concentration
of the occurrence of the disease in that country. At the end of February 2020, the United
States accounted for 29.3 million of the 118.8 million cases worldwide, with the U.S. num-
ber of cases being substantially greater than the sum of the number of cases in India and
Brasilien, which had the second and third highest number of cases, bei 11.3 million each.

In sum, 2020 COVID-19 has proved itself to be deadly different from the earlier 2002
SARS and 2012 MERS, rendering reckless leaders like Trump humbled humbugs. To
the rest of us, this event is a timely reminder that the past is often a very poor guide to
the future.

3. Factors that matter

Before we summarize and integrate the formal analyses of the cross-country comparisons
and the in-depth country experiences with COVID-19, we look at some key variables of 23

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Tisch 3. Public health preparedness, death rate, and growth in 2020

Economies

Vereinigte Staaten
Großbritannien
Australia
Thailand
Schweden
Denmark
Südkorea
Finland
Frankreich
Deutschland
Spanien
Norwegen
Malaysia
Belgien
Japan
Indonesien
Neuseeland
Vietnam
China
Philippinen
Indien
Russland
Taiwan

Preparedness
ranking in 2019

Deaths/100k of
Bevölkerung, 28 Feb 2021

GDP growth
In 2020 (est)

1
2
4
6
7
8
9
10
11
14
15
16
18
19
21
30
35
50
51
53
57
63
na

156.49
184.90
3.64
0.12
125.95
40.69
3.10
13.45
128.00
84.52
147.98
11.70
3.56
193.06
6.21
13.44
0.53
0.04
0.35
11.52
11.16
58.37
0.04

−3.4
−10.0
−2.9
−6.6
−2.8
−3.3
−1.0
−2.9
−9.0
−5.4
−11.1
−0.8
−1.1
−6.4
−5.1
−1.9
−2.2
2.9
2.3
−9.6
−8.0
−3.6
3.0

Notiz: Estimates for 2020 GDP growth: IMF (2021) for Australia, China, Frankreich, Deutschland, Indien, Indonesien, Japan,

Malaysia, die Phillipinen, Russland, Spanien, Thailand, UK and the United States / Kim (2021) for South Korea / Cheng

et al. (2021) for Taiwan / Stats NZ (2020) for New Zealand / countryeconomy.com (2021) for remaining.

economies to see if there are obvious patterns. Our sample of 23 economies consists of 10
Eastern Asian economies,8 9 Western European economies,9 Russland, Die Vereinigten Staaten, Aus-
tralia, and New Zealand.10 We begin by using the Global Health Security (GHS) index11 in
Tisch 3; this arranges these 23 economies according to their GHS index rank, and reports
the death rate (number of deaths per 100,000 of population) and the estimated GDP growth
rate in 2020 for each economy.

Tisch 3 shows the surprising absence of a clear negative correlation between the degree of
public health preparedness in 2019 and the COVID-19 death rate in 2020. Die Vereinigten Staaten

8 China, Indien, Indonesien, Japan, Malaysia, die Phillipinen, Südkorea, Taiwan, Thailand, Und

Vietnam.

9 Belgien, Denmark, Finland, Frankreich, Deutschland, Norwegen, Spanien, Schweden, and the UK.

10 The analyst’s decision about which data series to examine is inevitably based at least on an implicit
(often vaguely formed) hypothesis about causality and/or the transmission mechanism. The ex-
amination of data is arbitrary only when the analyst is totally at sea about how to think about the
problem and is looking randomly at data series that are available.

11 The GHS index was constructed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Healthy Security to rank the
degree of preparedness by 195 countries in 2019 to handle negative public health shocks like
the emergence and spread of pathogens (enabled by factors like climate change, Urbanisierung,
and international mass displacement of people), and accidental or deliberate release of a deadly
engineered pathogen.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

and the United Kingdom are ranked ﬁrst and second in the GHS index and yet they have
among the highest death rates, 184.9 Und 156.5 jeweils, compared with the lowest
ranked economies, Indien (NEIN. 57) and Russia (NEIN. 63), which had substantially lower death
Tarife, 11.2 Und 58.4, jeweils. This surprising feature in Table 3 is actually quite a gen-
eral phenomenon in that all six economies that had death rates above 100 are in the top 19
rank of the 195 economies—that is, these highest-death economies are in the top 10 Prozent
of economies in terms of preparedness for public health emergencies.

Two factors suggest themselves to be relevant here. The ﬁrst factor is “wrong policies ver-
sus right policies.” Although the United States, the UK, und Schweden (with GHS rank of 1,
2, Und 7, jeweils) had effective responses in place to be implemented, these responses
were either not implemented (Schweden), implemented late (Vereinigtes Königreich), or implemented badly and
half-heartedly (Vereinigte Staaten).

The second factor is that geography matters in COVID-19 outcomes. Five of the six
economies with death rates over 100 are in Western Europe and four of them are Schengen
Länder. Eight economies have death rates under 4, with six of them in East and South-
east Asia (Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Thailand, Südkorea, and Malaysia) und der andere
two in Australasia (New Zealand and Australia). There is a Europe–Asia difference in
fatality rates.

Tisch 4 reorganizes the data by regions, and the following two factors for why there is a
geographical difference in death rates seem reasonable.

Age structure of population
One general difference between Europe and Asia is that the proportion of elderly is sub-
stantially higher in the former; and it is known that COVID-19 is deadlier for the elderly.
Finland and Norway have the lowest death rates (13.45 Und 11.70, jeweils) in Western
Europa, and these rates are at the high end of Asian death rates—India (11.16), Indonesien
(13.44), and the Philippines (11.52), which are all young societies—even though Finland
and Norway are much higher ranked in the GHS index. The importance of the age struc-
ture factor as an explanatory factor is given more credence by the fact that (1) Japan, Die
most aged society in Northeast Asia, also has the highest death rate; Und (2) Russland, an aged
society, has a death rate of 58, which is within the range of European fatality rates.

Degree of geographical isolation that can be achieved
The low-population Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, and Norway, which are lo-
cated on the northern cold fringe of Western Europe, have the lowest death rates in West-
ern Europe. Russland, at the far fringe of Europe, has a death rate that is closer to Denmark
than to any of the non-Nordic Western European countries that together contain most of
the Schengen area population. The effectiveness of reducing infection and death by the

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Tisch 4. A geographical perspective on COVID-19 pandemic

Economies

Nordic countries
Denmark
Finland
Norwegen
Schweden

Non-Nordic Western Europe

Belgien
Frankreich
Deutschland
Spanien
Großbritannien

Northeast Asia

China
Japan
Südkorea
Taiwan

South and Southeast Asia

Indien
Indonesien
Malaysia
Philippinen
Thailand
Vietnam

Others

Australia
Neuseeland
Russland
Vereinigte Staaten

Quelle: See Table 3.

Preparedness
ranking in 2019
(out of 195)

Deaths/100k
of population
(28 Feb 2021)

GDP growth
In 2020
(%, estimate)

8
10
16
7

19
11
14
15
2

51
21
9
na

57
30
18
53
6
50

4
35
63
1

40.69
13.45
11.70
125.95

193.06
128.00
84.52
147.98
184.90

0.35
6.21
3.10
0.04

11.16
13.44
3.56
11.52
0.12
0.04

3.64
0.53
58.37
156.49

−3.3
−2.9
−0.8
−2.8

−6.4
−9.0
−5.4
−11.1
−10.0

2.3
−5.1
−1.0
3.0

−8.0
−1.9
−1.1
−9.6
−6.6
2.9

−2.9
−2.2
−3.6
−3.4

successful control of a country’s borders is supported by the low death rates in faraway
Australia and New Zealand, which both have low population and tight controls on entry
and stringent border health-screening and quarantine.

The geographical partition in Table 4 also allows us to identify more clearly the contribu-
tion of “wrong policies” in creating huge disparities in the death rate. The United States is
separated from Europe by the large Atlantic Ocean, and from Asia by the even larger Pa-
ciﬁc Ocean; and its border with Mexico in the Trump period was a de facto militarized zone
(z.B., heavily guarded with night-vision cameras and intensively patrolled by surveillance
drones, backed up by rapid-response immigration teams), complete with a high and thick
border wall. Noch, until Joseph Biden took over in January 2021, there was no health screen-
ing at the entry points, and there were no quarantine requirements. Geographical isolation
was possible to achieve, but barriers to entry into the United States were ramped up only
for mainland Chinese, poor Latin Americans, and select groups of Muslims.

The age structure of the U.S. population would have also helped to lower the death rate
because it is not an aged society like Western Europe, Japan, and Russia, and is also not
a rapidly aging society like China, Südkorea, and Taiwan. Only Belgium has a death
rate (193) that is higher than that of the United States (156). Im Gegensatz, the geographically

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

isolated and non-aging societies of Australia and New Zealand have deaths rates of only
3.6 Und 0.5, jeweils.

Until Trump left ofﬁce in January 2021, he and the conservative governors of several large
states maintained their refusal to promote mask wearing and social distancing. Trump de-
voted his time, stattdessen, to riling up xenophobic emotions. He escalated his racist rhetoric
with remarks such as “China Virus” and “Kung Flu,”12 and he pulled the United States out
of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic
after claiming that WHO had turned a blind eye to malicious behavior by China. Das
non-science-based public health position of the Trump administration reﬂected Trump’s
political instinct and the tribalist nature of Trump’s political movement.

Tisch 4 also allows us to see the human and material costs of different public policy re-
sponses to COVID-19, taking China and Sweden as polar cases. The death rate was 0.35
in China and 125.95 in Sweden; and their GDP growth rates in 2020 war 2.3 percent and
−2.8 percent, jeweils.

China adopted lockdowns in its strictest sense, deploying a stringent formula of imme-
diate lockdowns and mass testing even at the ﬁrst signs of infection. There is perhaps no
stronger example of this than Wuhan, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, where a com-
plete lockdown of the population was put in place from 23 January to 8 April. The Chinese
government also decreased population mobility nationwide—for example, extending the
duration of the Lunar New Year holiday break, and closing schools, museums, and provin-
cial public transportation. A nationwide public information campaign was also launched
to promote social distancing and hygienic measures, and to discourage the visiting of rela-
tives during the Lunar New Year period.

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Schweden, andererseits, only provided voluntary social distancing guidelines at bars,
restaurants, parks, public transportation, and schools. At the height of the coronavirus out-
break in spring, Sweden’s death rate was not only one of the highest in Europe, it was also
on par with the United States. Jedoch, the daily number of new infections in Sweden
started declining rapidly in late June, bringing the daily number of deaths from COVID-19
to just three daily deaths in early September compared with a peak of 115 Im April. Wann
the number of new cases per capita in Sweden averaged lower than Norway and Den-
mark, state epidemiologist Tegnell proclaimed that “Sweden has gone from being one of
the countries in Europe with the most spread to one that has some of the fewest cases in
Europe” (Erdbrink 2020).

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12 Vasquez and Klein (2020) und Lee (2020). Biden banned this racialization of COVID-19 when he

came into ofﬁce (The Star Democrat 2021).

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

But the situation reversed after early September. The debate on the wisdom of the herd im-
munity solution to the COVID-19 challenge was ﬁnally settled on 16 November 2020 Wann
Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told the Swedish public: “Don’t go to the gym, don’t go the
library, don’t have dinner out, don’t have parties—cancel!”; followed by the announce-
ment of strict social distancing measures beginning the week after (Schaverien 2020). Der
next day, King Carl Gustaf posted a royal message on Instagram instructing his subjects
to “Hold on tight!” (ibid.). Jedoch, Tegnell insisted in a BBC interview that it is “not yet
possible to say which country has right strategy” (BBC 2020c).

A month later, in Gustaf’s annual TV interview, er sagte: “I think we have failed. Wir
have a large number who have died and that is terrible.” Lofven agreed: “Of course
the fact that so many have died can’t be considered as anything other than a fail-
ure” (BBC 2020c). It seems likely that Tegnell is now one of the few defenders of herd
immunity left.

As China is very different from Sweden, the comparison of outcomes is rightly subject to
disputes on many dimensions. A comparison among the Nordic countries in Table 4 würde
come closest to a controlled experiment, given their similarities in economic structure,
physical geography, and socioeconomic framework. The unfortunate but unsurprising out-
come is that Sweden has a signiﬁcantly higher death rate than its Nordic neighbors, welche
had all implemented early lockdowns of their economies. The death rate (up through the
end of February 2021) War 125.95 6 in Sweden, 40.69 in Denmark, 13.45 in Finland, Und
11.70 in Norway.

The surprising outcome from the comparison of Nordic countries was on the economic
front. Der 2020 GDP growth rate for Sweden is expected to be −2.8 percent, a bit better
than Denmark’s (−3.3 percent), almost the same as Finland’s (−2.9 percent), but markedly
worse than Norway’s (−0.8 percent). Zusamenfassend, Sweden allowed many more citizens to die
without bringing much more economic beneﬁts to the survivors. It was magical thinking to
believe that COVID-19 could be allowed to run its course unimpeded to attain the natural
nirvana state of herd immunity in the community.

4. The proof in the pudding

“Comparing COVID-19 Control in the Asia-Paciﬁc and North-Atlantic Regions” by Jeffrey
D. Sachs in this issue quantiﬁes the relative importance of the key factors in determining
the virus’ daily reproduction number (R) In 25 economies during the ﬁrst wave of infection.
R tells us the average number of infections that is transmitted by an infectious individual.
If R is less than 1, then the infectious individual would infect less than one other individual
on average, meaning the number of active cases in the population would decline over time.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

But if R is larger than 1, each infected individual will, on average, infect more than one
person, hence causing the epidemic to expand.

Sachs’ main ﬁnding is that the Asia-Paciﬁc Region—which Sachs deﬁnes as mainland
China, Hongkong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Australia, Neuseeland, and the ASEAN
countries—has effectively controlled the epidemic in comparison with the North Atlantic
region, which includes North America and Western Europe. Between the two regions, Die
Asia-Paciﬁc region reported fewer conﬁrmed cases and deaths per million, with a lower
disruption of economic activity.

Sachs also evaluates the seven public health approaches to control and contain the virus, Zu
be used in combination:

1. stopping the entry of infected individuals from other countries;
2. promoting individual responsibility in avoiding infection through hygienic practices

such as wearing face masks and physical distancing;

3. isolating infected individuals to keep them from infecting others;
4. protecting vulnerable groups, especially the elderly, from infection;
5. protecting residents of congregate settings such as care centers, prisons, Und

worker hostels;

6. shutting down schools and public events (sports, religious, entertainment); Und
7. shutting down workplaces and order non-essential workers to shelter at home.

He notes that strategies (1), (2), Und (3) are low-cost measures. Im Gegensatz, the lockdowns
espoused in strategies (6) Und (7) carry a tremendous cost to the economy.

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According to Sachs’ regression results, the variable with the largest magnitude by far is hy-
gienic behavior, which includes four distinct practices: the wearing of face masks, avoiding
crowded places, improving personal hygiene, and avoiding touching objects in public. Ac-
cording to Sachs’ estimate, varying hygienic behavior from 0 Zu 1 results in a reduction of
R by 2.0. As the frequent point estimate of COVID-19’s R reproduction number is 2.4, uni-
versal hygienic practices would thus reduce R to 0.4, which is more than enough to contain
the virus.

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The indicator with the next largest impact on the regression is the economic shutdown
indicator. Jedoch, a full lockdown, meaning a 100 percent drop in visits to economic
sites, would only result in a modest reduction of the R reproduction number of the virus.
Sachs argues that this underscores that lockdowns are “at best a stop-gap policy un-
til more efﬁcient and powerful public health measures—hygiene and isolating—can be
scaled up.”

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Sachs found that when it comes to deploying the low-cost public health measures of early
restrictions on international travel, widespread use of face masks and physical distancing,
and testing-isolating-and-tracing, the Asia-Paciﬁc region outperformed the North Atlantic
region and were less reliant on costly lockdowns.

This difference translated to the Asia-Paciﬁc region’s performance in terms of containing
the virus. In contrast to North Atlantic countries, several Asian-Paciﬁc economies showed
“superlative results” in suppressing the virus and keeping death rates per million very
niedrig, which include Australia, Kambodscha, China, Hongkong, Japan, Korea, Lao PDR, Neu
Zealand, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Sachs’ analysis of the Asia-Paciﬁc experience provides evidence that the pandemic can be
contained through public health means such as improved hygiene, face mask wearing, Und
isolation of infectious individuals, instead of a primary reliance on lockdowns.

In response to Sachs’ ﬁndings, Pengfei Li, Ming Lu, and Yilin Zheng, in “A Note on the
Role of Cultural, Institutional, and Urbanization Features in the COVID-19 Pandemic,”
contend that hygienic behavior like the willingness to wear masks is “related to cultural
traditions.” According to the authors, “traditional Confucian culture emphasizes the
achievement of social stability via individual internalization of social welfare,” which ex-
plains why “governments throughout much of East Asia adopted comprehensive lock-
down policies during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 because they judged their citizens
to be willing to comply.” In contrast, North Atlantic countries tend to prioritize individ-
ual freedom, thus its governments were “less inclined” to impose lockdowns in containing
the pandemic.

James K. Galbraith, in his comment on Sachs’ paper, cautions that while the Asia-Paciﬁc
region has indeed outperformed the North Atlantic region in terms of containing the virus,
“one should be wary of drawing cultural inferences.” Galbraith highlights that Japan’s
performance in reducing R is not much better than the United States or Canada, und das
Philippinen, Indonesien, and India have some of the highest cases in the world despite hail-
ing from the Asia-Paciﬁc region. Andererseits, Denmark, Norwegen, and Finland are
doing well despite opting for lockdowns instead of low-cost public health means, as we
discussed above. To borrow Galbraith’s words, much remains to be explored.

5. Lives versus livelihoods

The IMF’s World Economic Outlook in October 2020 reports that lockdowns can substan-
tially lower infections (z.B., a stringent lockdown leads to a reduction in cumulated infec-
tions of about 40 percent after 30 Tage. Countries that deployed lockdowns early when
the number of cases were still low reported considerably fewer infections compared with

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

countries that introduced lockdowns when cases were already high. Besides the early
adoption of lockdowns, the lockdowns must be strict enough to contain infections, sug-
gesting therefore that stringent and short-lived lockdowns would be superior to mild but
prolonged measures.

The IMF’s analysis also conﬁrmed what many already knew, that lockdowns have a con-
siderable negative effect on economic activity. Interessant, it found that the recession was
also largely driven by people voluntarily reducing their social interactions out of fear of
contracting the virus. Tatsächlich, the analysis indicates that voluntary social distancing played
a near comparable role with lockdowns in the contraction of economic activity. The crucial
ramiﬁcation is that lifting lockdowns would unlikely result in a rise in economic activity
as voluntary social distancing would still persist, especially when infection numbers are
still high.13

What is becoming clearer to see from the emerging evidence is that the oft-touted assump-
tion that countries face a trade-off between health and the economy in their responses to
COVID-19 is perhaps unfounded. This initial assumption has been revealed to be a false
dilemma. Tisch 3 showed that the three economies with the lowest death rates—Taiwan
(0.04), Vietnam (0.04), and China (0.35)—were the only ones with positive GDP growth
rates in 2020, suggesting that economies that had managed to control the pandemic had
also generally protected their economy. This relationship is a weak one, Jedoch. Der nächste
group of low-fatality economies—Thailand (0.12) and New Zealand (0.53)—had nega-
tive growth rates but there was not a monotonic relationship between death rate and GDP
growth rate, as the 2020 GDP growth rate was −6.6 percent for Thailand and −2.2 percent
for New Zealand. To quote Bhanupong Nidhiprabha, there is simply “no paradox between
the low death rate caused by COVID-19 and the economic hardships caused by COVID-19
because there is no determinate relationship between these two variables” (“Comment on
‘The Paradox of Thailand’s Success in Controlling COVID-19’ by Poum Tangkitvanich”).

6. Asian experiences

The evidence just discussed shows that it is possible for countries to achieve good out-
comes on both health and economic dimensions in response to COVID-19. But what were
the precise strategies taken by these countries and are there lessons to be learned by the

13 Analyzing location data from about 45 million mobile devices, Alcott et al. (2020) conﬁrmed

that ofﬁcial stay-at-home orders had very little to do with the huge drop of economic mobility
in den Vereinigten Staaten. Chetty et al. (2020) found from private sector data that high-income house-
holds sharply reduced spending in sectors that require physical interaction due to health con-
cerns and that state-ordered reopening of economies have had only small impacts on spending
and employment.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

rest of the world? Where do Asian economies fall in the divide between lockdown or
no lockdown?

The experience of Taiwan, detailed by Chun-Chien Kuo in “COVID-19 in Taiwan: Eco-
nomic Impacts and Lessons Learned,” is particularly worth examining as Taiwan ﬁnds
itself with the stunning record of actually recording a positive 1.59 percent GDP growth
in the ﬁrst quarter of 2020, while maintaining one of the lowest death rates in the world
without the use of lockdowns. Kuo’s analysis reveals that much of its economic rebound
can be attributed to a rise in external demand for its information and communications tech-
nology and semiconductor products. The author asserts that this is more the exception
than the norm, stating that Taiwan’s economic success in this speciﬁc area seems more the
result of being situated in larger global economic contexts, instead of the government’s
relief package.

If Kuo is hesitant to credit the government’s actions for Taiwan’s bounce in its information
and communications technology and semiconductor exports, any reluctance dissipates
in his exposition of Taiwan’s implementation of its national “precision-prevention” strat-
eins, which he praises for the minimal health and economic impacts to the society. Taiwan’s
experience of SARS led to substantial improvements in its public health system, of which
the existence of a national health insurance program with 99 percent population coverage
played a crucial role in ensuring that all active cases, even foreigners, received proper med-
ical care. A key success factor in the Taiwanese response was how early the government
responded to the outbreak, with the creation of a central command center merely weeks af-
ter the ﬁrst cases of an unknown pneumonia were notiﬁed to the WHO by China. Obwohl
it did not adopt a lockdown, Taiwan was one of the earliest economies to implement bor-
der closures, which helped reduce the inﬂux of potentially infectious travelers from China
in the early stages of the outbreak. Taiwan also applied its artiﬁcial intelligence and big
data technology not only to detect and track cases, but also to enforce home isolation and
home quarantine policy. Zum Beispiel, passenger travel histories, medical information of
quarantined individuals, and even their cellphone location data are captured by Taiwan’s
big data cloud system, which makes it easy to test, trace, isolate, and monitor cases.

Ähnlich, South Korea was able to ﬂatten the curve of its infections with minimal economic
disruption, as Byungho Lim et al. recount in “COVID-19 in Korea: Success Based on Past
Failure.” Initially deemed as the second most vulnerable country to the virus after China,
South Korea has instead become a model nation in the global ﬁght against COVID-19. Es ist
“3T” approach of large-scale testing-tracing-treating has been key to its success, especially
the much-heralded use of drive-through testing centers that have been followed by other
Länder. Instead of imposing a lockdown when numbers surged, the government merely
announced work-from-home guidelines and asked the public to reduce non-essential out-
door activities and to wear masks in public. When numbers dropped to single digits in

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

April 2020, the government decided to relax the guidelines and switch to what it calls the
“everyday life quarantine” system, whereby, with social distancing and maskwearing in
Ort, Koreans could return to their daily lives with the exception of attendance at high-
risk facilities such as sports stadiums, concert halls, and universities. Economically, Süd
Korea’s private consumption did not fall as much as the OECD’s prediction of a one-third
decrease. Stattdessen, fueled with a large ﬁscal stimulus that is equivalent to 54 percent of its
2020 budget, domestic sales have returned to pre-outbreak levels.

Where Taiwan and South Korea were successful in containing the virus without use of
a lockdown, China adopted the most severe lockdowns. In the early stages of the two-
month-long lockdown of Wuhan, people were allowed out to purchase food, but this was
completely halted by mid-February where no one could leave their home compounds. Wei
Tian in “How China Managed the COVID-19 Pandemic” provides us with an explanation
as to why such a harsh lockdown was enacted in Wuhan. The month before Wuhan was
placed under lockdown coincided with the peak period of population mobility due to the
Lunar New Year celebrations, where people usually return to their hometowns for the fes-
tivities. The city of Wuhan had the tenth largest population outﬂow among Chinese cities,
with an average daily outﬂow of 250,000 Menschen. During this peak period, the population
outﬂow from Wuhan to other cities numbered at 4.3 Million, which made up 70 percent of
total outﬂow. The lockdown of Wuhan was therefore necessary to avoid a large outﬂow of
people spreading the virus across the country.

Allgemein, China discouraged all travel, both within-country and out-of-country, by reduc-
ing ﬂights and train services, closing tourist sites and public events, and enforcing mask-
wearing and social distancing. Due to measures like these, intercity population mobility
was greatly reduced, helping China to curb massive spreads of the virus across the coun-
versuchen. Although China’s GDP contracted by 6.8 percent in the ﬁrst quarter, its rapid contain-
ment of the virus has helped its economy to rebound in the second quarter by 3.2 Prozent,
far exceeding the 1.2 percent projection of the IMF and superior to many other economies.
Tian’s account of the second wave of infections that hit Beijing in June is particularly valu-
able in understanding how the Chinese government has so efﬁciently reﬁned its system-
atic and standard epidemic containment practices, so much so that this second wave was
brought under control in less than a month.

If the likes of China and Taiwan’s responses exemplify the continent’s “gold standard,”
a region as large and diverse as Asia would inevitably also carry accounts of government
missteps and policy failures.

Zum Beispiel, the speedy response of Malaysia’s Ministry of Health in combining robust
contact tracing measures with punitive lockdown orders helped the country to record
one of the lowest death rates in the world. There was a severe lockdown from 18 Marsch

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

durch 3 May under four consecutive Mobility Control Orders (MCOs), followed by a
Conditional MCO between 4 May and 9 June that allowed many businesses to reopen and
permitted some interstate travel. With continued decline in COVID-19 cases, a Recovery
MCO was proclaimed on 10 Juni 2020, which allowed the almost complete resumption
of normal economic life, but restrictions on international travel remained in place, albeit
greatly relaxed. Trotzdem, its 17.1 percent GDP contraction in the second quarter of
2020 was the worst in ASEAN. Muhammed Abdul Khalid, in “COVID-19: Malaysia Expe-
rience and Key Lessons,” attributes this to the government’s miniscule direct ﬁscal injec-
tion of only 1.9 percent of GDP, far lower than the ASEAN-6 average.

After the completion of Khalid’s paper in mid-September 2020, the point at which his ac-
count stopped, Malaysia’s initial successful response has become a distant memory. Bei der
end of July 2020, the Sabah state government on Borneo island was brought down by defec-
tions and new elections were called for 26 September 2020. The enforcement of social dis-
tancing regulations at political gatherings was not strict, making all of them superspreader
Veranstaltungen. Politicians and campaign workers travelled back and forth between Peninsular
Malaysia and Sabah in August and September, but quarantining and screening protocols at
these airports were deemed unnecessary by health authorities.

Malaysia’s case tally started skyrocketing upward in October and a partial lockdown was
re-introduced on 9 November 2020. The number of infections continued to climb, Jedoch,
und weiter 11 Januar 2021, the federal government announced the re-imposition of its strictest
form of lockdown, the MCO, An 13 Januar 2021. On the day before, 12 Januar 2021, Die
King declared Emergency Rule in Malaysia (whereby the seating of Parliament was sus-
pended) under advice from Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin that this political measure
was necessary to “to control and ﬂatten daily COVID-19 positive cases that have breached
four ﬁgures continuously since December” (Rodzi 2021). Previous nationwide emergencies
were in 1964 during the Indonesia-Malaysia conﬂict, und in 1969 during an ethnic clash.

Unlike the temporary success in Malaysia, Thailand was successful in containing the out-
break of the virus within its population. This achievement, Jedoch, risks being overshad-
owed by its economy’s largest annual contraction in 22 years during the second quarter
von 2020. Poum Tangkitvanich opines in “The Paradox of Thailand’s Success in Control-
ling COVID-19” that the Thai economic lockdown was overly harsh and lasted longer than
needed with its repeated extensions despite the fact that daily domestic infections were
regularly at zero, although some, like Nidhiprabha, speculate that the prolonged lockdown
was more likely to prevent political protests.

If the Thai case shows that a country’s economic recovery may not necessarily accom-
pany its epidemiological success, the Philippines stands on the other end of the spectrum.
Despite imposing the longest lockdown on Southeast Asia, the country now has the highest

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

number of infections in the sub-region. Despite having strong macroeconomic fundamen-
tals before the pandemic, the Philippines ended up with the second largest GDP contrac-
tion in the second quarter of 2020 and the worst projected economic growth outcome in
2020 among its ASEAN neighbors (siehe Tabelle 4). Most commentators and fund managers
have attributed this output collapse to the strict community lockdown imposed by the gov-
ernment in March that went on until the third quarter of the year.

Jedoch, Toby Melissa C. Monsod and Maria Socorro Gochoco-Bautista (“Rethinking
‘Economic Fundamentals’ in an Era of Global Physical Shocks: Insights from the Philippine
Experience with COVID-19”) argue that underlying institutional factors play a larger role
in explaining the Philippines’ economic and health outcomes rather than the country’s use
of lockdowns. According to the authors, the choice of containment measures was a reﬂec-
tion of how organized and prepared public health institutions were in facing global shocks
like COVID-19. The authors agree that the lockdown of the country was necessary to con-
tain the pandemic but make the case that the Philippines failed to use the “bought time”
from the lockdown to scale up an effective national system of testing and tracing. Specif-
isch, they point at the country’s poor pandemic response infrastructure, which would
help explain the recent blunders in testing and quarantine protocol amid the return of more
als 100,000 overseas workers after losing their jobs abroad.

Citing the Philippines’ robust macroeconomic ratings before the pandemic, the authors as-
sert that the institutional preparedness of governments matter much more in dealing with
global shocks than macroeconomic metrics. Using a cross-sectional data set of 24 coun-
versucht, the authors sought to test this hypothesis by examining the relationship between the
projected economic contraction in 2020 and the capability of the national health systems
to detect and respond to emergency outbreaks. The regression ﬁndings strongly support
the authors’ argument that institutional capacities and capabilities inﬂuence intercountry
difference in post-pandemic economic outcomes more so than other factors such as initial
ﬁscal position, average age of the population, and country-speciﬁc geographical effects.
Daher, instead of the timing, intensity, or length of lockdowns, the core capacities of coun-
tries to detect and respond to the pandemic accounts signiﬁcantly for the poor economic
outcomes of countries like the Philippines.

The Monsod and Gochoco-Bautista results also suggest that, for pandemics, the usual met-
rics of robust macroeconomic fundamentals either do not matter or, worse, are associated
with poorer economic outcomes. The authors opine that that the usual multiplier effects of
traditional macroeconomic channels are either not operative or, if they are, are overshad-
owed by the need for speciﬁc core capacities to address the underlying physical causes
of disease transmission and progression. Crucially, the authors warn that large ﬁscal
spending can even result in perverse economic effects if it is not directed at addressing the
pandemic itself. Fiscal injections to boost a country’s national health system capacity
should be prioritized over and above other types of traditional stimulus spending, mit

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Tisch 5. GDP loss in 2020 (% deviation from the baseline)

Country/region

Argentina
Australia
Brasilien
Kanada
China
Frankreich
Deutschland
Indien
Indonesien
Italien
Japan
Mexiko
Other Asia
Other oil producing countries
Republik Korea
Rest of Euro Zone
Rest of OECD
Rest of the world
Russland
Saudi-Arabien
Südafrika
Truthahn
Großbritannien
United States of America

S01
−0.2
−0.3
−0.3
−0.2
−0.4
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.3
−0.1
−0.1
−0.2
−0.1
−0.2
−0.3
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.1
−0.2
−0.1

S02
−0.3
−0.4
−0.3
−0.2
−1.9
−0.3
−0.3
−0.2
−0.2
−0.3
−0.4
−0.1
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.3
−0.2
−0.3
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.2
−0.1

S03
−0.5
−0.7
−0.5
−0.4
−6
−0.3
−0.5
−0.4
−0.3
−0.4
−0.5
−0.1
−0.4
−0.4
−0.3
−0.4
−0.5
−0.3
−0.5
−0.3
−0.4
−0.2
−0.3
−0.2

S04
−1.6
−2.1
−2.1
−1.8
−1.6
−2
−2.2
−1.4
−1.3
−2.1
−2.5
−0.9
−1.6
−1.4
−1.4
−2.1
−2
−1.5
−2
−0.7
−1.8
−1.4
−1.5
−2

S05
−3.5
−4.6
−4.7
−4.1
−3.6
−4.6
−5
−3.1
−2.8
−4.8
−5.7
−2.2
−3.6
−3.2
−3.3
−4.8
−4.4
−3.5
−4.6
−1.4
−4
−3.2
−3.5
−4.8

S06
−6
−7.9
−8
−7.1
−6.2
−8
−8.7
−5.3
−4.7
−8.3
−9.9
−3.8
−6.3
−5.5
−5.8
−8.4
−7.7
−5.9
−8
−2.4
−7
−5.5
−6
−8.4

S07
−1.2
−2
−1.9
−1.6
−2.2
−1.5
−1.7
−1.3
−1.3
−2.2
−2
−0.9
−1.5
−1.3
−1.3
−1.9
−1.8
−1.5
−1.9
−1.3
−1.5
−1.2
−1.2
−1.5

Quelle: McKibbin and Fernando, this issue.

investments in the former potentially being able to do more for economic recovery than
the latter.

Aside from studies of country-level responses to the pandemic, this double special issue of
ASEP also features empirical analyses of novel queries that have arisen from the pandemic.
Applying a hybrid of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium and computable general
equilibrium models, Warwick McKibbin and Roshen Fernando in “The Global Macroeco-
nomic Impacts of COVID-19: Seven Scenarios” look at the potential global economic costs
of COVID-19 in 2020 under seven different permutations. Scenarios 1–3 assume that the
virus’ epidemiological effects are contained in China but the economic effects spill over
from China to other countries through trade, capital ﬂows, and changes in the risk pre-
mia in global ﬁnancial markets. Andererseits, scenarios 4–6 reﬂect epidemiologi-
cal shocks occurring in differing degrees in all countries. For scenarios 1–6, it is assumed
that the shocks are temporary whereas scenario 7 expects a mild pandemic to recur each
year indeﬁnitely.

The McKibbin-Fernando model predicts that for each scenario, there is a V-shape recov-
ery apart from scenario 7, where COVID-19 recurs indeﬁnitely. Tisch 5 summarizes the
resulting GDP loss for each country under the seven scenarios.

An interesting ﬁnding from “Impacts of Lockdown Policies on International Trade” by
Kazunobu Hayakawa and Hiroshi Mukunoki is that workplace closure orders do not
affect intra-Asian trade. In comparison, Iwan J. Azis, ICH. G. Sthitaprajna Virananda, Und

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Fauzi I. Estiko (“Financial Spillover in Emerging Asia: A Tale of Three Crises”) found that
the scale and nature of spillovers from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is set to be more
severe than the ﬁnancial spillover during the GFC and the 2013 taper tantrum from the
phasing of quantitative easing by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

On the effects of the pandemic at a more micro-level, Toshihiro Okubo, Atsushi Inoue,
and Kozue Sekijima (“Teleworker Performance in the COVID-19 Era in Japan”) anschauen
teleworker efﬁciency in Japan and whether COVID-19 has changed the performance of
Japanese teleworkers. Gesamt, the authors found that: (1) compared with working as
normal, the efﬁciency of most teleworkers is reduced by around 20 percent on average;
(2) longer experience in teleworking helps improve efﬁciency; (3) the employment system,
such as ﬂexible working time, can contribute to boosting efﬁciency; Und (4) poorer mental
health conditions due to the COVID-19 crisis worsens teleworking efﬁciency.

7. Unmasking culture

What various sources of evidence have shown is that there is much diversity and diver-
gence in terms of both approach and result in the responses of governments to the pan-
demic. From Table 3, we know that prior preparedness counts for little when there is
failure in execution (Vereinigtes Königreich), leadership (USA), and diagnosis (Schweden). Countries like China
and South Korea drew on their past experiences with epidemics (particularly SARS and
MERS) to mount successful strategies to contain the virus. It is simply wrong to largely
view the solution as a binary choice between lockdown or no lockdown. We see from
the success stories in Asia that the appropriate policy combination consists of (A) Kneipe-
lic health measures like social distancing, mask-wearing, and hygienic behavior; Und
(B) targeted macro-stimulus aimed at disaster relief, service industries, and small and
medium enterprises.

Take the wearing of face masks. As Sachs points out, there was a large disparity in hygienic
practices such as face mask use between Asian and Western economies, especially in the
ﬁrst few months of the pandemic. The proportion of the population that wore masks at
each point in time is shown for China, Indien, Japan, and Taiwan in Figure 1; for Indonesia,
Malaysia, die Phillipinen, and Thailand in Figure 2; for the four Nordic economies in Fig-
ure 3; and for France, Deutschland, das Vereinigte Königreich, and the United States in Figure 4.
These four ﬁgures on mask-wearing behavior in 16 economies cover (meistens) the period
from March 2020 through December 2020. Comparison of them highlights two differences
that need explaining.

The four Nordic economies and the UK were unusually slow in adopting mask-wearing
In other economies, the proportion of mask-wearers in the population responded quickly
to the COVID-19 outbreak in the home economy to reach at least 60 percent in May 2020.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Figur 1. Mask-wearing as percent of population in China, Indien, Japan, and Taiwan

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Quelle: YouGov (2021).

Notiz: Period is March 2020 through December 2020, except for China data ending on 11 Oct 2020; and Japan data ending on 3 Mai 2020.

In May 2020, the proportion of mask-wearers was less than 10 percent in the Nordic
economies, and under 20 percent in the British economy.

One could think of mask-wearing as less needed for sanitary reasons in the “sparsely
populated” Nordic economies when interpersonal contact is rarer, but then the UK
is deﬁnitely not sparsely populated. Does the reluctance to respond quickly to wear-
ing masks in these ﬁve populations show a deep cultural difference not only between
them and Asians, but also between them, Americans, and other Europeans (Frankreich
and Germany)? This last question suggests that “culture” is a weak explanation for
this “slow to adopt” phenomenon in Denmark, Finland, Norwegen, Schweden, und das
Großbritannien.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Figur 2. Mask-wearing as percent of population in Indonesia, Malaysia, die Phillipinen,
and Thailand

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Quelle: YouGov (2021).

In steady-state, Asian populations had a generally higher proportion of mask-wearing
than non-Asian populations
In all eight Asian populations, the proportion of mask-wearing was mostly at or above 80
percent in the May 2020 through December 2020 Zeitraum. The French proportion of mask-
wearers went over 80 percent since late July 2020; die USA. proportion reached 70 Prozent
in late June 2020, and went over 80 percent only since November; the British proportion
climbed upward slower (as noted earlier) to cross 70 percent in mid-August 2020 and then
to cross 80 percent on November 2020; and the German proportion stayed put at 60 Prozent
in the May–October 2020 period and moved to 70 percent in November.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Figur 3. Mask-wearing as percent of population in Denmark, Finland, Norwegen, und Schweden

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This resistance to mask-wearing is most pronounced in the four Nordic economies, Wo
the proportion of mask-wearers in June 2020 was under 10 percent for every country. In
September 2020, es war 34 percent in Denmark, 21 percent in Finland, 16 percent in Nor-
Weg, Und 8 percent in Sweden; and the respective numbers in December 2020 war 69 pro-
cent, 65 Prozent, 48 Prozent, Und 16 Prozent.

Some analysts have attempted to explain this difference between Asian and non-Asian
populations by attributing it to the so-called conformist and collectivist cultures of Asian
societies whose citizens are more likely to mask themselves and practice social distancing
out of respect for government guidelines and the welfare of others, as opposed to “indi-
vidualistic” Western populations who care more for personal liberty. Others like Sweden’s
Minister of Health and Social Affairs Lena Hallengren would say that there is no “tradition
or culture” of mask wearing in their country, unlike Asia.

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Figur 4. Mask-wearing as percent of population in France, Deutschland, das Vereinigte Königreich, Und
Die Vereinigten Staaten

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Quelle: YouGov (2021).

Although cultural values can inﬂuence a population’s response to events such as a pan-
demic, such essentialist caricatures may obscure and ignore the crucial role of government
policy in driving these practices in the ﬁrst place. It is perhaps a trite point that govern-
ment policy inﬂuences behavioral outcomes. The act of mask-wearing is not endemic to
any culture nor did it emerge out of a vacuum. If Asian economies such as Hong Kong and
Taiwan appear to have a “culture” of mask-wearing, it is more likely because it is a direct
result of experiencing past epidemics such as SARS whereby wearing face masks was a
recommended practice.

Strict enforcement, especially when accompanied by punitive actions, can be highly effec-
tiv. In Malaysia, face masks were made compulsory in crowded public areas from 1 Au-
Böe 2020 onwards. Face mask use in the country jumped from under 50 percent in March
Zu 91 percent by August—Malaysia now records the highest face mask use in the YouGov
tracker as of 28 Februar 2021.

Außerdem, countries with high face mask use often had leaders who not only commu-
nicated the importance of such practices but also set an example for their populace. Für

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

Beispiel, Western countries like Slovakia and Czech Republic are not the ﬁrst places that
one associates with the prevalent use of face masks, but their leaders have been shown
to wear masks in public appearances and this played a crucial role in normalizing its use
among their citizens. It is no surprise that face mask usage is so low in countries like the
United States where President Trump constantly downplayed the importance of wearing
face masks, or in Brazil where President Jair Bolsonaro only started to wear face masks af-
ter being ordered to do so by a federal judge.

The contrast in face mask use prevalence between Finland and Sweden is another example.
In Sweden, where authorities actually recommend against wearing them, face mask use
was at 8 percent in September 2020. In comparison, after Finland reversed its policy in Au-
gust and recommended that people wear masks in public places, mask use jumped from 7
percent at the end of June to 46 percent on 12 Oktober 2020.

It is also of little use if governments mandate the wearing of masks or other hygienic
behavior if there are inadequate supplies of the very items that are needed for these
Praktiken Methoden Ausübungen, even in countries where mask-wearing is the norm. Noch einmal, the role of
government is crucial. In “How Did Japan Cope with COVID-19? Big Data and Purchas-
ing Behavior” by Yoko Konishi, Takashi Saito, Naoya Igei, and Toshiki Ishikawa, the au-
thors use point of sales data from supermarkets, convenience stores, home centers, drug
stores, and electronics retail stores to show that mask sales in Japan spiked following the
WHO’s declaration of a global state of emergency in January, causing a shortage of face
masks in the market. This shortage moderated, Jedoch, after Japanese authorities im-
plemented a ban on reselling masks and introduced a subsidy for businesses to expand
mask-producing capacity.

In Taiwan, Kuo documents how the government pioneered a digital rationing system to
facilitate mask distribution for its residents. Citizens could purchase face masks from state-
contracted pharmacies either online or in person. For the latter, the digital system assigned
citizens to different dates according to the last digit of their national ID number to avoid
long queues. An app was also developed that worked to inform citizens of the number of
masks in stock at each store, along with information on store names, Standorte, opening
hours, and contact information. A special committee was also established to drive the pro-
duction of masks domestically—as a result, 60 mask production lines were created that
enabled daily domestic mask production to be increased from 1.88 million to 19 million as
of the end of April 2020.

Simply put, if governments do not recommend mask use and implement policies that en-
courage it, citizens will not wear them readily. This is the key differentiating factor instead
of a population’s alleged primordial propensity to wear masks. Although citizens are indi-
vidually accountable for their own hygienic behaviors, this does not absolve governments

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Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?

of their crucial role and responsibility to inculcate and encourage such practices, as the
Asian experience illustrates.

8. What is to be done?

The key practices in successful government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are:

1. Early border controls to contain the initial spread of the virus from abroad;
2. Rapidly increasing the capacity of national health systems in terms of mobilizing staff,
securing supplies (z.B., protective equipment and respiratory devices) and optimizing
Raum (z.B., ensuring adequate numbers of acute and intensive care beds) to scale up
testing-tracing-treating infrastructure;

3. Promoting individual hygienic behavior such as social distancing and face mask use,
which requires, jeweils, active government enforcement of regulations against
holding superspreader events, and strong government intervention in the market to
ensure adequate supplies;

4. Fiscal measures to extend disaster relief to workers, businesses, and vulnerable

Populationen; Und

5. Clear, concise, and consistent communications from leaders and authorities.

These common measures seem so intuitive and straightforward, but why then have so
many places failed to implement these measures, or when implemented, fail to achieve
comparable results?

Sherry Tao Kong in “Comment on ‘COVID-19 in Taiwan: Economic Impacts and Lessons
Learned’ by Chun-Chien Kuo” offers a likely explanation. The likelihood of such measures
being implemented successfully by a government is “likely to be a function of its prevailing
Bedingungen, such as provision of public health service, degree of socioeconomic inequality,
household living arrangements, and general attitude towards its government.”

In der Tat, as has been often said, the pandemic has laid bare all the social, politisch, and eco-
nomic fault lines that have already existed in a society. This is especially true for lower-
income countries. If higher-income countries with sophisticated health systems are strug-
gling to contain the virus, what about states with lesser public health infrastructure and
weaker social safety nets? Whereas richer countries can have the luxury of choosing
whether to implement lockdowns, low-income countries have had no choice but to keep
their economies open (or open them prematurely) because they cannot afford ﬁscal injec-
tions to keep individuals and businesses aﬂoat. The ﬁscal stimulus in the G20 so far is 17
percent of GDP, which is eight times more than the low-income countries’ macro-stimulus
von 1.9 percent of GDP (Ragaa and Velde 2021). Indien, zum Beispiel, had lifted lockdown

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measures prematurely to revive an economy that is likely to hit a 30-year-low, although
case numbers have surged to record highs.

This is where international cooperation can play a role. International cooperation against
the pandemic will not only assist countries, especially poorer states, to contain the
virus and exit the epidemiological crisis in the immediate term, but can also facilitate
socioeconomic recovery and help prepare for future pandemics and other global crises
in the longer run. But a global response to the crisis has been glaringly absent. Stattdessen, ef-
forts against COVID-19 are largely domestic-centric so far. While it is understandable that
countries prioritize their own needs ﬁrst, the infectious nature of the virus means that no
country is safe until every other country is also safe. Global access to future vaccines, sup-
plies, tests, and treatments is the only way to ensure the virus is truly eradicated within a
country. Governments of rich countries should commit not only to preserve trade open-
ness for these vital items, but also to ensure that poor countries have access to key medical
supplies at affordable prices. All these efforts must be accompanied by ﬁscal support by
developed countries to help countries in need to successfully deploy both epidemiologi-
cal and economic measures in curbing the virus—rich countries should establish a global
fund to provide the poor countries with the needed vaccine, and to enhance their efforts in
testing, Verfolgung, and treating COVID-19 cases.

The need for global cooperation has become even more urgent as frequent pandemics
could become the new norm. Humanity’s relentless encroachment on the environment
guarantees this.

Verweise

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