South Korea would have had to neglect to report 99% of COVID-19 deaths.
At first, I thought it was the govt covering something up, but after so many months, along with closely monitoring things, I trust their numbers.
It is literally a source of national pride for them to have done so well, it would be very hard for them to hide things.
Quarantine, masks, isolation, cleaning, testing, contact tracing. ALL WORKED.
There's no plausible argument from counterfactuals here.
But let's pretend anyway - do you not think that even if a more virulent strain of Covid did arrive, country with proven measures in place has a better chance of dealing with the problem than a country whose current response is a chaotic shambles?
The measure of success is all past and current. If Vietnam loses control over covid, then we can definitely blame them for that. Why? Because they effectively controlled it in the first place.
If they continue their direction, they will be one of the only countries on the planet, not totally infected. Pretty amazing really. If they start experimenting and doing things differently, at least they've setup the protocols for managing things correctly.
Here in the US, we go through these bullshit 'phases' where we go from phase 2 to phase 3 and then back to phase 2. Well, anyone with half a brain could have figured out that wasn't going to work. At least Vietnam is taking this seriously.
They shut their borders entirely... we (the US), can't even do that.
Faking what? Demanding what?
When I arrived at the end of January (during the Chinese New Year) there were thousands of Chinese tourists mobbing the convenience stores buying up all the masks they could find. At the time I wasn't really aware of what was happening, but clearly they were a step ahead of the game, likely based on past history with SARS and news coming from friends and family back home.
It's pretty amazing how low the case count has been in Vietnam; some locals say, "don't believe the government", but you'd expect any outbreaks/deaths related to COVID-19 to have gotten out by now if the government were in fact trying to hide something.
https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...
On the other side of the world it was complete lack of leadership and even dismantling of the preparation efforts that were taken earlier.
A good example is the child mortality statistics - the US counts babies born alive, but then die, but other countries just count them as stillbirths if the death happens with X period of time.
Not saying Taiwan is hiding tens of thousands of deaths, but you have to assume some wiggle room in the numbers.