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Sliding doors
According to the WHO, the COVID-19 outbreak is the worst pandemic of our modern times. I want to focus on public health policies and their consequences on the humanitarian, economic, and geo-political outcomes.
There are two categories of pandemics’ costs. There is the human cost, in brief, the death toll. But there also is an economic cost, or the loss in economic activity caused by the epidemics. These two costs are both small or very large, respectively, for minor (and short-lived) infections events or large (and long-lasting) epidemics. However, they create a trade-off for public health authorities for intermediate severity/duration of outbreaks: I will show how these costs do not evolve together. My worry is that this is poorly understood by authorities of the West, and choices are being made without a holistic understanding of costs.
At first, the disease was isolated in China, last November, and turned into a national emergency just as Chinese families were about to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The second cluster country was Korea, particularly the city of Daegu.
An analysis of public health strategies put in place by these two countries provides the basis for my reflections below. I will call the Chinese strategy ‘Containment’, and the Korean one ‘Behavioural’.
