Fighting #COVID19 - The Asian Perspective
Here are three insightful posts from the last couple of months each highlighting a different aspect of how Asian countries reacted to COVID19.
How Japan is combating SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19
Japan deviated early on from the recommended process to fight the pandemic: it never did a lot of testing, ignored smaller outbreaks, and refrained from countrywide lock-downs. Instead, Japanese authorities focused on finding and isolating clusters of infections.
For months the approach of Japanese epidemiologists puzzled their Western colleagues. After reading an article in Science, leading German virologist Christian Drosten finally realized in late May 2020 what Japan was actually doing and what we in the West could learn here.
But it never was a secret what Japan was trying to do. There were articles like this one, which described the Japanese strategy in every detail. They realized very quickly two simple facts:
COVID19 is not spreading like the flu, where every infected person gives the virus to 1 or 2 others. Instead, most people infected with SARS-CoV2 don’t infect anyone else, while a very small number of people do infect many others.
These so-called super-spreading events usually have three things in common: they happen in (1) enclosed spaces with poor ventilation, where (2) many people in close proximity are engaged in (3) conversations and vocalizations at close range.
All three conditions have to come together for a super-spreading event to happen. Where this occurs Japan authorities act swiftly and decisively, while ignoring more or less anything else.
Proving this logic, there were no transmissions in crammed Tokyo subways. Because while it is an enclosed space with poor ventilation and many people, Japanese don’t talk on the train (and do wear masks 😷), so the third condition is not met. Therefor the subway seems to be safe. A Karaoke bars with many people? Not so much!
This Japanese approach has worked well so far, and as mentioned above articles about it were published as early as March. So why didn’t anyone in the West use this knowledge in April or May? Probably because it was published in Japanese.
And this points to a wider problem: many Asian scientists can read Western publications in English, but nearly no Western scientist can read anything published in Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
Have you ever thought about how hard it will get to follow the latest research on AI, quantum computing or 6G telecom systems in the years to come without understanding Asian languages…?
Compaq and Coronavirus – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Compaq used to be the fastest startup to hit $100 million in revenue, then the youngest firm to break into the Fortune 500, then the fastest company to hit $1 billion in revenue. By 1994 it was the largest PC maker in the world. Wow! After that, it started to outsource all the “hard work” (aka manufacturing) to Asia, focusing on branding & sales and by doing so it started its decent into oblivion.
Who talks about Compaq in 2020?
Ben Thompson does! And he uses its example to compare the Western “society of talk” (focusing on branding & sales) to an Asian “society of Action” (actually producing stuff by hard work).
Which to him explains why Asian countries are way more successful in coping with COVID19: because they immediately started to do the hard work of testing & tracing at scale with a whatever it takes approach - while Western countries started to talk:
There the only options are to give up the economy or give in to the virus: the possibility of actually beating the damn thing is completely missing from the conversation. (…) The first problem of being a society of talk, not action, is the inability to even consider hard work as a solution;
How Taiwan used tech to fight COVID-19
Using tech to fight something like COVID19 is a double-edged sword. It always comes with the risk of enabling a kind of surveillance, that could be hard to rid of once we got rid of the virus.
How AI, Big Data & Co. can be used quite effectively to fight the pandemic without compromising citizen rights or democratic values, was demonstrated in Taiwan - on many levels:
Track COVID-19 with Big Data Analytics
Location-Tracking for Self-Isolation
Detect & Control Shortages of Critical Supplies
Use of AI, Data Analytics and Digital Communication for Accurate Public Information
This post was originally published with Issue #8 of the ChinaBriefs Newsletter