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South Korea, once lauded as an example for Europe on how to tackle the coronavirus pandemic effectively, is likely to impose tougher restrictions in the run up to Christmas and the New Year. This is shocking turn of events comes after the country has seen infection and death rates spike in recent weeks with no sign of abating, and is testimony to the fact that Seoul’s measures haven’t been as successful as previously claimed.
In battling a Covid-19 wave that is hitting with a vengeance, the East Asian country’s woes are similar to Europe’s, where the Czech Republic, Slovakia and even Germany, among others, who were similarly once lauded for their response, have proven unable or unwilling to repeat the actions that kept them safe in the spring – and are now being devastated by the second wave.
Cluster Headaches
During the first months of the pandemic, the biggest clusters of coronavirus infections in South Korea were found among the country’s several Christian megachurches. This has given rise to a logical fallacy, where Koreans associated infections strictly with a handful of hotspots and ignored other vectors meaning that most people believed to be safe from infection as long as they weren’t connected to the institutions at the centre of the outbreak. But as Health Minister Park Neunghoo put it: “We’re in a situation where it is not strange at all if anyone contracts the virus during our daily lives.” The fact that around 500,000 students moved around the country for university admission tests in early December only made things worse.
Since then, officials identified clusters in nursing homes, saunas, workplaces, even a table-tennis club in the densely populated greater Seoul area, prompting increased restrictions on public gatherings. Outbreaks are now popping up outside of the capital, with the southern city of Busan and the mountainous Gangwon Province becoming worrying prospects. While the method of cluster-identification worked admirably in South Korea during the early days of the pandemic, its efficiency has dropped as more and more case-based contacts spread.
Central European Woes
Some EU countries followed a similar trajectory, with the governments in Prague and Bratislava being hailed in the spring for their swift response to limit the spread, only to be hard-hit during the autumn. The Czech in particular, who managed to maintain less than 400 identified daily cases during the initial spread, were so satisfied with their handling of the coronavirus that in June around 2,000 people gathered at a 500m-long dinner table on Prague’s famous Charles Bridge for a party billed as a “symbolic farewell” to the crisis. At the time, there were more people at the table than active Covid cases in the country.
Only three months later, Czechia had one of the continent’s highest infection rates, facing peaks in excess of 15,000 daily cases in a country of 10 million people. Confident in their ability to deal with the second wave using softer methods and unwilling to impose a second lockdown on economic and political grounds, Prague failed to replicate earlier successes. After much deliberation and shuffling of feet, both the Czech Republic and Slovakia reactivated the state of emergency in October and began to witness a slow, but steady decline in new cases.
This hesitation, however, came with a very heavy toll. In the entire time between the appearance of the new coronavirus and the last days of September, only 600 people had died of the coronavirus in the Czech Republic. By December, that number had risen to over 9000, with more than 100 new deaths still reported each day.
Lessons for Europe
Worldwide, governments sought to avoid drastic protective measures during the second wave in order to protect the economy and avoid costly government support for those affected by lockdowns. “Restriction fatigue” also put a political strain on authorities to avoid the more draconic measures taken during the first wave, particularly in countries where elections were held. But Central Europe’s wrangling with the second wave proves how deadly the consequences of inaction can be.
In many cases, the second wave of coronavirus hit countries regardless of how well they did during the first wave, despite the fact that experts warned this were likely to happen. These reversals of fortune indicate that EU policy-makers haven’t found the right mix for balancing economic considerations, managing “restriction fatigue” and limiting infection rates. However, good examples exist, and the European Union would be wise to consider them.
Short-term, the lessons come from countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, who managed to limit their total number of cases to the lower thousands even at the height of the second wave. Despite having objectively fewer resources than most EU members, these South-Asian countries used a focus on high-risked individuals, extensive contact tracing and travel restrictions to keep the pandemic in check. Having gained wisdom from previous outbreaks of SARS and avian flu, they took the pandemic seriously from the beginning and are now reaping the rewards.
For longer term solutions, however, EU members need to look within. The actions of both state and private actors have proven that Europe must increase cooperation between the member states and abandon the approach that places financial profit at the top of society’s pyramid of needs. Decades of attacks against public health systems were muted by the collective needs that a global catastrophe brings, when they proved to be the only things keeping entire countries from collapsing.The lessons produced by the pandemic should be neither forgotten, nor placed neatly behind a glass that reads “Break in case of emergency”. The EU should make Europe a safer place for its inhabitants and strengthen its institutions so future impasses can be averted. To do otherwise will only make it more likely that 2020 will be not an exception in the context of the 21st century, but a grim warning of things to come.
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