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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

I live in a less developed part of the world - Vietnam - and the government and people have been incredibly successful in controlling the virus here. Aside from two short lockdowns of a couple of weeks, my life has barely been affected (except for the lack of tourists and the fact I can't travel outside the country). Local tourism and business seems to be booming. Meanwhile I hear all the stories from back home in Europe, and from the US... And my sympathies go out to everyone living though that. But I don't the development level of a country has much at all to do with how well it's handling this pandemic.

The only frustrating thing is how clearly it's been highlighted that the rich and powerful countries get all the vaccines and we'll only get them here once everyone in the west has been vaccinated three times over.

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Vietnam and India aren't so comparable. In spite of both getting the label "developing country", India has more extreme poverty than Vietnam. Vietnam is also a more centralized, authoritarian state that is in a better position to enforce restrictions.

Of course. And the US had Trump leading it through the pandemic and a huge portion of the population who view mask wearing as a violation of fundamental rights. My point is that a country's status as "developing" doesn't seem to be the determining factor in how well they'll deal with it. Other factors are more important.

Like what? Respect for human rights? I mean, my brother is in Vietnam and some of the stuff they do there would be unconstitutional in the US.

Well, the right to keep and bear arms is constitutional in the US, so forgive me for discounting that statement.

It seems having right wing populists run the counties doesn't help much - see Trump, Bolsonaro, maybe to an extent Boris and Modi.

> The only frustrating thing is how clearly it's been highlighted that the rich and powerful countries get all the vaccines and we'll only get them here once everyone in the west has been vaccinated three times over.

Shouldn't countries that developed vaccines should take care of their citizens first?

That's one take, but not all endorse it.

"Which approach leads to the least dead people globally?" is another potential way of looking at things.

That's the greedy, shortsighted, tribal way of looking at things, sure.

>we'll only get them here once everyone in the west has been vaccinated three times over.

Shipment of AstraZenca to Vietnam has started already. Wikipedia says 60m doses ordered "Including 30 million donated by COVAX Facility. Produced by SK Bioscience (South Korea)"

Ordered and promised is not the same as delivered. So far I think it's about 800k doses delivered - enough for 0.5% of the population - and the EU has announced they are halting Covax for now.

Yeah but there are quite a lot scheduled, I think from S Korea which should bypass the EU. Also Vietnam signed up for the Russian vaccine. Not sure how that one's going.

One can only be ashamed about the state of things. There are NGOs which try to help, but this is clearly not enough. And it is dumb, too - we will not get rid of the virus until all countries work together and help each other. It is a global issue, and our leaders do not have half enough brain to understand that.

I mean, it’s not that they don’t understand this, it’s that they understand their electorate wants the vaccine first, and if they can’t get a vaccine while the news tells them their politicians sent vaccine supply to Vietnam they’ll vote you out of office. So you end up with half hearted things like this that seem designed to generate the least controversy: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/18/covid-vaccine-update-biden-t...

Basically handing money out to NGO’s so they generate headlines as helping and not the US government for the time being.

> The administration stressed that the globally-focused funds will have no impact on the U.S. domestic vaccination program.

Please differentiate more. The US and UK don't share, but the EU does. The egoism of some countries hurt the idea of a free and equal world a lot these days...

No, the EU doesn't, unfortunately.

> EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the bloc will not share coronavirus vaccines with other countries until it has "a better production situation in the EU." This is reported by DW.

https://112.international/politics/eu-wont-share-covid-vacci...

> No, the EU doesn't, unfortunately.

The EU did. For a year. And now it doesn't, since the UK and USA do not.

> For a year

The first vaccine only came out about 4 months ago.

However, you are right - the EU has donated about 30 million doses, enough for 15 million people. It's not nothing, but not that much either.

It's not just about donations, it didn't block deliveries either.

One month ago:

> Overall, 77 million doses have been shipped from the European Union since early December, 88 million will have been distributed internally by the end of the week, and 62 million shots have been administered within the bloc, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/covid-vaccines-e...

The EU tried to play nice and it was screwed over by other countries and by AstraZeneca.

If you look at the numbers, the EU exported almost as many vaccines as it used, while its vaccination rate was half the UK/US one.

why would they give all their vaccine and forget about their own people

they did, then stopped to plan the production, so they can share more later, that makes 100% sense and seems to be the best strategy to vaccinate everyone safely

Saying "no they don't" is mostly a lie and is unfair to say, such a simplistic sentence that hides the real intentions

Absolutely not true. The UK Government paid for the AZ vaccine to be developed and then stipulated as part of the contract that it must be made available at cost to developing countries.

The EU on the other hand keeps seizing vaccines produced for other countries.

> The EU on the other hand keeps seizing vaccines produced for other countries.

Citation needed. I've not heard about this at all.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/eu-official-a...

That's one seizure, of a small number according to the source. The claim was 'keeps seizing'...

Why isn't a small number enough? The law abiding distributors would follow the ban, thus making further seizures unnecessary. Though to be honest the EU ban only targeted export to countries with better conditions (lower case rate or higher vaccination rate than Europe) and was only to last a few weeks, at least initially.

It was a ban to export mainly to UK which already had plenty of vaccines. And AZ wasn't delivering to EU what was promised.

If you promise to deliver you better do, or don't produce the product in there and ship it elsewhere.

And the way that the UK shares is by setting up production in other countries, which makes more sense than producing in the UK and shipping everywhere. But it makes it look like the UK is tight-fisted because the vaccines don't get exported.

One of the first AZ production sites was in India.

Governments can't control a virus. East Asia seems to have existing immunity or a genetic factor that means they aren't getting hit anywhere near as badly as other parts of the world.

I live in Atlantic Canada and we absolutely controlled it. So did Australia and New Zealand.

Yes, mostly islands or places with low population density. The outlier is Vietnam.

Mainland countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand (though that's now changing). Much of Africa, nominally, though I suspect that's seriously underreported. Sevaral of these are densely populated.

Island territories are clearly easier to control movement to and from, but that is not the ony factor.

And, of course, China. Again, if reports are to be believed.

I think you should (mostly} believe reports from China - their lockdowns were unbelievably strict, much more even than here in Vietnam.

As for Africa, yeah, there's probably major undereporting.

The China numbers seem ... mostly consistent. There doesn't seem to be unexplained excess mortality, after the initial Wuhan lockdown, there are few reports of additional restrictions on mobility (outside the separate set of issues in Xinjiang associated with the Uyghur genocide). The case numbers remain remarkably low, given global experience and as the origin point of the pandemic. I'm keeping an open mind to the prospect that a more severe story may still emerge, though as of yet, that's not something I can point to specific evidence of.

It wouldn't surprise me to see a several-multiples underreporting, largely based on limitations of available diagnostic testing as of a year ago, but I'd doubt it's the 10x -- 20x (or far worse) underreporting seen elsewhere.

East and Southeast Asia generally (you report in another comment you're in Vietnam), along with Australia/New Zealand, have been the standout success stories in the Covid story so far. This runs strongly against early expectations and narratives, and has been pretty fascinating to watch.

I've seen and called out underreporting in Iran (last March--April) and Turkey (last October--November), previously, each of which saw case counts revised sharply upwards within days or weeks. In both cases based on deaths vs. cases, which is one of the more reliable indications of underreporting. I've also noted Sweden's very long lags (up to 2--3 weeks) in simply compiling case and deaths data, which tended to understate the severity of the runaway growth in the October--November period last year.

(Discussions of all of this in my Joindiaspora posts, these are hard to search.)

Deaths lagging cases by 14--21 days means that strong demonstration of underreporting via deaths data often only comes after the situation's gotten sharply out of hand. We're seeing cases of thirtyfold growth of cases in Thailand (over the course of three weeks) and India (since mid-Feburary). The problem with pandemics is that given increased transmission rates, cases can take off tremendously in a very short time period, something various denialists and critics seem to pointedly fail to grasp. (No, I'm not accusing you of that here, though there are clearly some matching that description posting in this thread.)

So very remote places that managed to close off contact with the outside world early.

No one closed off contact, quarantine is mandatory though. That only keeps it out though, most places have had outbreaks and had to rely on measures completely unrelated to their remoteness, like lockdowns and contact tracing.

???

You do know that East Asia has been hit several times by local epidemics (for example SARS) and that people have gotten used - based on previous government recommendations/mandates - to wear masks? That same culture used to people wearing masks is obviously helping now.

Governments can't completely control a virus, but they can definitely help curb its spread by taking effective measures. And one of that measures is effective communication, for example.

This is not just the people getting used to wearing mask. This is the government having an existing plan to actually combat a pandemic.

The response of most Western governments have been shambolic: here in the UK the government didn't start doing widespread randomised COVID tests until August, and even when they did the results covered such a big area that were practically useless.

For most of 2020 we simultaneously received news similar to "South Korea locks down this district of Seoul after a lot of people tested positive for COVID in a party last night" and "the UK government is considering a country-wide lockdown in the next few weeks because the amount of people being treated for COVID in hospitals". The difference in prevention infrastructure and planning were embarrassing.

We had pandemic preparedness guidelines, and none of them involved lockdowns. They go thrown away in blind panic.

There are only two Asian countries where mask wearing was common. South Korea and Japan. Hardly anywhere in Asia got hit hard. One theory is that there is a lot more contact with bats, trading them which act as a reservoir, and providing some level of immunity. Obesity rates will be another big factor. Masks show very little evidence of having any effect whatsoever.

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