This is a very important topic and question, but I fear that you generalize too much and your assessment of Western politicians’ understanding lacks subtlety. In particular, my opinion is that the obviously good strategies were just not politically feasible. In the beginning of the pandemic, I used to treat arguments of the form “The successful strategy of country A is just not possible in country B” as defeatism and status-quo bias, but I now believe that the South Korean model is indeed not possible in Western democratic countries. This can be seen by creative and smart initiatives of some Western countries that nevertheless failed.
You mention that the government holds the following misconception:
It’s fine to hover just below the point where hospitals get overwhelmed—it’s not important to bring down the number of active cases as low as possible
However, the German government is perfectly aware of the meaning of exponential spread, here is chancellor Angela Merkel explaining what R means and why a value of 1.1 would be too high.
While hand-washing was an important recommendation in the beginning here as well, our public health messaging has been focused for some time now on droplet and aerosol transmission. School and university classrooms are often required to be ventilated at regular intervals (which for most schools is not doable, but that’s a different topic). Hand sanitizer is also much easier to implement than any ventilation measure in Winter.
You also invoke the risk society thesis, but this would apply to Asian countries as well, which were able to contain the virus.
In addition, I think “the summer success in Western countries was not due to measures but due too weather effects” is far too strong a claim. European countries had a decent contact tracing system and cancelled mass events, while the US did not have the first part and had far worse numbers in summer.
Why the South Korean model would not work in the West:
South Korea did contact tracing very well, with huge invasions of privacy like checking CCTV data, publishing the whereabouts of infected individuals and using credit card transaction history. In the US and the UK contact tracers are happy if contacted individuals pick up their phone at all. It’s paradoxical, but it seems to me that Western populations would rather accept a wrecked economy, restriction of movement AND hundred thousands of deaths than a temporary surveillance program.
Examples of Non-Asian countries with smart but failed initiatives:
As far as I can tell, there has only been one Western country to try to eradicate the virus, namely Israel which implemented very tight border control policies and a mobile phone surveillance initiative very early. However, my impression is that cooperation of the populace is just not high enough, which is why a second lockdown had to be imposed.
A to me pretty saddening case is the initiative of the Slovak government to test its entire working age population through cheap antigen tests. Testing was semi voluntary, with the other option being mandatory quarantine. New infection numbers fell very rapidly, but because the testing was done in parallel with a partial lockdown it’s not exactly easy to determine causality. However, since many other European countries with similar lockdowns have at best a flattened curve it seems very likely that mass testing was a great idea which is why it’s copied now in parts of England, Austria and Italy. Despite the large success and subsequent reopening, another round of mass testing has in Slovakia been postponed indefinitely, mostly because the mandatory quarantine got many voters angry and popularity of the government has been waning rapidly.
So in conclusion, many smart policies are much harder to implement in Western countries and may actually reflect the preference of the population, and that our current situation is not because of governments “[...] making some silly errors, not updating their information, and not thinking through the long-term effects. ”
However, there was/is room for fairly cheap wins through scientific and regulatory adaptation. This post is already too long, but briefly put the failure seems to be in those two areas. Despite strong theoretical justifications, no country (AFAIK) has so far approved at home, cheap antigen testing.
This is a very important topic and question, but I fear that you generalize too much and your assessment of Western politicians’ understanding lacks subtlety. In particular, my opinion is that the obviously good strategies were just not politically feasible. In the beginning of the pandemic, I used to treat arguments of the form “The successful strategy of country A is just not possible in country B” as defeatism and status-quo bias, but I now believe that the South Korean model is indeed not possible in Western democratic countries. This can be seen by creative and smart initiatives of some Western countries that nevertheless failed.
You mention that the government holds the following misconception:
However, the German government is perfectly aware of the meaning of exponential spread, here is chancellor Angela Merkel explaining what R means and why a value of 1.1 would be too high.
While hand-washing was an important recommendation in the beginning here as well, our public health messaging has been focused for some time now on droplet and aerosol transmission. School and university classrooms are often required to be ventilated at regular intervals (which for most schools is not doable, but that’s a different topic). Hand sanitizer is also much easier to implement than any ventilation measure in Winter.
You also invoke the risk society thesis, but this would apply to Asian countries as well, which were able to contain the virus.
In addition, I think “the summer success in Western countries was not due to measures but due too weather effects” is far too strong a claim. European countries had a decent contact tracing system and cancelled mass events, while the US did not have the first part and had far worse numbers in summer.
Why the South Korean model would not work in the West:
South Korea did contact tracing very well, with huge invasions of privacy like checking CCTV data, publishing the whereabouts of infected individuals and using credit card transaction history. In the US and the UK contact tracers are happy if contacted individuals pick up their phone at all. It’s paradoxical, but it seems to me that Western populations would rather accept a wrecked economy, restriction of movement AND hundred thousands of deaths than a temporary surveillance program.
Examples of Non-Asian countries with smart but failed initiatives:
As far as I can tell, there has only been one Western country to try to eradicate the virus, namely Israel which implemented very tight border control policies and a mobile phone surveillance initiative very early. However, my impression is that cooperation of the populace is just not high enough, which is why a second lockdown had to be imposed.
A to me pretty saddening case is the initiative of the Slovak government to test its entire working age population through cheap antigen tests. Testing was semi voluntary, with the other option being mandatory quarantine. New infection numbers fell very rapidly, but because the testing was done in parallel with a partial lockdown it’s not exactly easy to determine causality. However, since many other European countries with similar lockdowns have at best a flattened curve it seems very likely that mass testing was a great idea which is why it’s copied now in parts of England, Austria and Italy. Despite the large success and subsequent reopening, another round of mass testing has in Slovakia been postponed indefinitely, mostly because the mandatory quarantine got many voters angry and popularity of the government has been waning rapidly.
So in conclusion, many smart policies are much harder to implement in Western countries and may actually reflect the preference of the population, and that our current situation is not because of governments “[...] making some silly errors, not updating their information, and not thinking through the long-term effects. ”
However, there was/is room for fairly cheap wins through scientific and regulatory adaptation. This post is already too long, but briefly put the failure seems to be in those two areas. Despite strong theoretical justifications, no country (AFAIK) has so far approved at home, cheap antigen testing.