Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan deserve praise for fighting Covid-19.
While Singapore and South Korea were hit with a second outbreak, their robust containment measures have kicked back in to stop rapid spread of the virus once more. As New Zealand ponders how to prepare for a future pandemic, it should look to East Asia.
Vietnam and Hong Kong also showed early success againt the coronavirus, but the New Zealand Government has focused its attention on those first three countries.
The common factor for their success was their experience with the SARS pandemic in 2003 and MERS in 2015. They built better epidemiolgocial and quarantine systems along with border controls, high-level diagnostic testing and rapid contact tracing capacities. They also regularly disinfect public spaces and encourage the public use of masks.
In the last few weeks, another outbreak of Covid-19 makes it appear Singapore’s performance was a complete failure, but it was not. These new community cases constitute only 7% of the total count and more accurately reflect human error in monitoring a handful of migrant dormitories than a systemic failure of the city-state’s response plans.
Further north, South Korea recovered quickly from an initial outbreak in March. The government’s ‘smart-city data hub’ allowed it to quickly locate cases again after a second outbreak occurred in Seoul bars. So far, a total of 1982 possible cases have been rapidly traced by this system, keeping the average number of fresh daily cases low at 23.
Stanford University’s Jason Wang said Taiwan’s response was among the best in the world. Its timely border controls for flights coming from China began on December 31, 2019 – a full month before other nations thought about similar controls. By March 20, Taiwan only had 27 new cases. Once again, a digital surveillance system was critical in tracking down and isolating individuals with the virus.
New Zealand’s Covid-19 containment performance was impressive. But, as Kiwi epidemiologists have emphasised, its contact tracing system still has plenty of room for improvement. As South Korea and Singapore have shown, there is still a real risk of a second outbreak from even one new superspreader.
That’s why it is an imperative that New Zealand take this opportunity to repair and prepare its contact tracing capacity to ensure the country holds onto its hard-won gains. Those three East Asian states offer plenty of great examples to get this done.