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Comment by decafninja | Hacker News Reader

The Asian countries that fared relatively well - Taiwan/Japan/Korea/etc.etc. - I guess you could chalk it up to cultural differences, but what and how did Australia, a "Western" country that I reckon is culturally more similar to the USA and Europe than to say, Japan or Korea, do so well and differently vs. the USA? Correct me if wrong, but Aussie culture has an individualistic streak like the USA too, doesn't it?

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Well, how hard countries were hit early on seems to heavily depend on distance from Italy and the amount of travel from there. There was a very noticeable gradient in Europe with Italy as the epicenter as I recall. (A lot of media coverage talked about Taiwan etc doing well despite lots of travel from China, but that seems to be a bit of a red herring - for whatever reason, almost all countries did pretty well at holding back the initial wave of cases from China, even the USA. Genomic tracing suggests it was Covid spreading from Europe to New York and then to the rest of the country that did the US in. Quite likely from Italy, given the timing of New York Fashion Week.) Then the countries with big initial outbreaks never really managed to recover, though dodging the worst of it initially didn't guarantee future success.

Australia and New Zealand are of course an awful lot closer geographically to Taiwan, Japan and Korea than they are to Europe - and there's a huge variation between all those countries in terms of the other things you might think affect Covid, like willingness to lock down, culture, level of testing, etc..

Geography, topology, authoritative control, non-porous border which was closed, mandatory two week quarantine for any exception

+ a small population of 25 million

yes thats useful context, I was mentally grouping that into topology kind of stretching that to the few areas where people live and how desolate the rest is

Australia abandoned their own citizens abroad to thundering applause. No other country on Earth did that.

The number of people allowed back into the country is minuscule and right now, foreign business travellers get priority on flights because they can pay more for seats.

another factor could be how cohesive / fragmented the government response is -- maybe this is another facet of "authoritative control".

here's a crude model as a straw-man thought experiment:

australia has a federal government with some degree of control but the 8 local state/territory governments still get a reasonable amount of ability to make local decisions. The states often disagree with the federal government, and with each other, and have disagreed about the appropriate responses to covid in many cases.

Suppose the federal government has no ability to control anything. Each local government has a 95% chance of doing something reasonable in response to a pandemic and a 5% chance of doing something stupid. If we make the poor working assumption that each local government decides what to do independently of the others, then about 2/3rds of the time we would expect all 8 australian local governments to do something reasonable, and 1/3 of the time one or more local government will respond to the pandemic in a stupid way. So maybe we got to see the 2/3rds outcome in australia -- or perhaps we actually saw a 1/3rd outcome where stupid decisions were made that dramatically elevated risk, but we simply got lucky.

In contrast the US has say 51 local government regions, so there's about a 7% chance that they all do something reasonable and a 93% chance that at least one local government region does something stupid.

Then if it is hard or impossible to isolate the impacts of bad decisions to each local region, the impact of poor decisions in one region can help outbreaks spread in connected regions.

On another hand, a downside of having a strong central control of the entire country's response is that if that central response is stupid, then the entire country starts cohesively doing something stupid, whereas a country with more fragmented/decentralised decision making might fare a bit better locally.

that's a very interesting way of looking at it, but also in the US you would have very many people in a place with reasonable policies implemented that will simply go to a place with unreasonable policies

(assuming reasonable means policies that mitigate and slow down the spread of COVID19, but I'm not saying anybody else reading this has to subscribe to that thought or the idea that COVID19 is worthwhile to slow down)

Those places all happen to be islands (South Korea being a political island). Regardless of population and density in the country, if you share land borders, you are subject to the whims of the least careful country on your subcontinent.

Vietnam’s doing well despite plenty of border. There’s clearly more than one variable at play.

I'm not too familiar with Vietnamese culture, but I'd probably chalk them up to the "Asian culture" factor which in general tends to be more collectivist than most Western countries.

Isn't Vietnam a highly authoritarian country too?

As someone who has lived in developing Asian countries to say there is a more collectivist culture isn’t accurate. Just look at the level of pollution (I’ll dump my trash here because who cares?) and “it’s not illegal if you don’t get caught” attitude.

I would say there is a much greater acceptance of control than in the West. If the govt decides to lock an apartment building up with residents inside to control Covid you won’t here many protests.

Of course. But even in Vietnam's case, geography is clearly playing a major role. Policy differences can explain variation within SE Asia, but all of those countries have spikes at the same time, and are in a relative bubble of land travel in the continent (major border with China, which is more or less COVID-free due to authoritarian measures, lowly trafficked mountain ranges and undeveloped regions, and a thin strip connecting to Malaysia).

Seems like the main factors for success are: 1. Geography 2. Density 3. Freedom (or lack thereof) 4. Masks 5. Money

> f you share land borders, you are subject to the whims of the least careful country on your subcontinent.

Only if a nation is incapable of controlling their land borders, and that doesn't have to mean fully closed.

All of those countries have had outbreaks and a single case in a country is enough to negate any advantage being an island brings, all have successfully controlled the virus even after it got a beach head.

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