a population of 5m? korea has 1000 a day (actually 600 today but i'll give you the rounding error) with a population of 52 million. it's new zealand who have 5 million people. their numbers are exceptionally low and have remained low throughout, without ever going to their 'tier 3' of effective lockdown/business shutdown.
they're in tier 2.5x or something now. most all retail businesses, cafes, restaurants, etc. have remained open all year. those all-important small businesses i was talking about above. restaurants are still full every night. if their policy was failing, the numbers would be much, much higher.
as i said, SK's middle-class are a pretty nascent phenomenon. we're not talking about a settled western social democracy like france or denmark; or even like new zealand or canada, for that matter. they don't have the political werewithal (or ideology) to furlough 10+ million people for months at a time. a full lockdown for even a month or two would spell business ruin for legions of lower-middle class families there. and businesses there, as we've discussed passim, are not exactly worker rights-friendly; everyone has been expected to come into the office pretty much all year, with little mention of remote working. so a full lockdown is truly a last-resort scenario for their government, who will be expected to intervene to a very high degree.
yes, letting nightclubs open on the surface of it can seem very silly. but japan have allowed clubs and venues to be open, too, whilst also implementing the strictest measures elsewhere, viz. in regards to their borders. it's about finding acceptable tolerances and locking down in a smart way. shutting down the entire economy is the dumb western measure that we've had to resort to - always too late - when the viral spread is already exponential and way beyond contact tracing. south korea has basically never reached that point.
to talk about 'failures of governance' when their graph has been flatlined throughout all of 2020 is a bit of a poor joke on them. to say they've been 'having a rough time in the last few months' is borderline hysterical: they're only just reached 1k cases per day ffs! it seems to me they've found acceptable tolerances and allowances without, say, ruining the education of the young, the timetables of their universities and medical schools, the everyday functioning of the economy, etc. and, yes, even clubs can open and operate safely if the pandemic is under control. aiming for 0 cases a day in a country of 50 million and a major international cosmopolitan hub is not realistic. new zealand's solution does not fit hardly anywhere else.
Last edited by uziq (2021-01-05 14:31:24)
