Best and worst countries on COVID-19 response

[Joseph Cao]

Weighing in on the ASEAN states I’ve been following – 

Singapore: The best response, and then some. Being a small, well-ordered city-state helps, even though they caught the brunt of the early wave of cases in February, and they reacted quickly and with an appropriate level of caution.

Vietnam: Runner-up. They've been pretty efficient at tracing cases and containing them.

––– big gap –––

The Philippines: Patchy response, but they’re handling it somewhat better than their neighbours are, principally because of non-governmental action in the early stages and a crackdown in the past few weeks, including declaring a state of national emergency and actually trying to provide economic relief to their citizens, unlike…

Malaysia: Our government finally tried to get its act together in the last week or so with nationwide movement–control measures, although their response otherwise has been exceptionally ham-fisted and opaque (an obvious downside of wasting the first month of the epidemic by overthrowing the previous government and then fighting petty political spats).

Indonesia: Bad. Very bad. The government inexplicably decided to downplay the early wave of cases last month (and continues to do so!), their number of cases is rising fast with a poor healthcare system about to buckle under the strain, and controlling its spread among such a large population has been justifiably difficult.

Thailand: This beats Indonesia out for the bottom ranking, if only because active negligence combined with the authoritarian streak of the official response is almost certainly worse than whatever Indonesia’s motivation for their lack of response is. Very few medical measures, almost all of the preventative nature; an attempt at price controls of face masks that failed spectacularly and also blew up in their faces; poor communication of every single measure the government has tried, including the abrupt partial lockdown of Bangkok – in short, absolutely no consistency in response – and one wonders why they have the second highest number of cases in the ASEAN region. (As of now, Malaysia has the highest number. ¡Viva Malaysia!)


Relative to non-ASEAN nations, I would put Singapore marginally ahead of South Korea. Indonesia’s  problems are comparable to those of India, although their response is behind India's. The Philippines and Malaysia are definitely in the bottom half of responses internationally. Thailand and Brazil can go to the bottom together, and would, except that Bolsonaro represents many more people than the Thai military junta does and will consequently cause more damage.

I should note that most if not all of these countries' responses have also been hampered by the tinderbox that is social media disinformation, which has ranged from the Philippines' folk advice about eating ginger to more institutional misinformation such as our own dear Health Minister talking about the antiviral properties of warm water. Testing and the state of the healthcare system remains a problem across the region to varying degrees, especially for countries not named Singapore.