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Opinion | Why the West’s coronavirus response shows it isn’t better than the rest of us
- Complacency and hubris caused economically advanced societies to believe they could easily handle the threat without understanding it fully
- The failure of Western leaders to properly prepare has exposed their weaknesses, and could mark a turning point in global history
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The coronavirus story was not supposed to unfold like this. While China has clawed itself out of its self-made pit, most of Europe and the United States remain mired in an escalating crisis, with the prospect of relief not yet in sight.
This unexpected reversal of fortune had happened because the Western world should have learned from China and other countries in East and Southeast Asia – but dithered until it was too late.
How did the West end up being the epicentre of the global pandemic? The main reasons are inexperience, a disunited population and hubris.
Its inexperience is not its own fault. Five of the six places that have been praised for their management of the novel coronavirus – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, China (eventually) and my own country Singapore , which is now threatened by a second, graver wave of infections – were some of the worst affected by severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2002 to 2004. The sixth, South Korea, escaped relatively unscathed that time around.
That outbreak, which was similarly caused by a coronavirus thought to have originated in China, killed 774 – or 9.6 per cent – of the 8,098 people it infected. So when the novel coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 disease arrived in January, these places deployed the same strategies that eventually subdued Sars: early detection, contact tracing and social isolation.
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