The Relentless Pandemic

East Asia, once the poster child for containing COVID-19 infections, is facing a new wave of cases.

- Jennifer Lee

Malaysia is staring a fourth wave of infections in the face, as daily case counts surge to over 6,000. Death tolls are also mounting as ICU beds are in short supply.

Singapore and Taiwan, success stories in handling the pandemic, are both rapidly imposing aggressive restrictions at home – and tightening travel between each other. Thailand’s daily tally has jumped from 50 in early April to more than 2,000 a month later.

Even China, which has been free of locally transmitted cases for about a month, recently reported a handful of local cases in the provinces of Anhui and Liaoning.

What happened?

COMPLACENCY In March, Taiwan’s karaoke bars were pumping, its stadiums were at 80 percent capacity and its markets thriving. Last week, its supermarket shelves had been stripped bare of toilet paper, cinemas shut down and masks made compulsory outdoors. The stock exchange slumped almost 4 percent, its biggest rout in a year.

For more than 12 months, Taiwan and its world-class tracing and quarantine measures had shut out the virus, limited its impact to 1000 cases in total, fewer than a dozen deaths and no lockdown.

By mid-May, the virus had seeded. Seven cases on 11 May grew to 185 by 15 May and 333 on 17 May. The Taiwan Centers for Disease Control traced the origins of the disease back to a cargo flight from Indonesia.

It’s a similar story elsewhere in Asia, from Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and South Korea. Hard-won freedoms have been snuffed out within days in other nations with strong records of suppressing COVID-19. Many of them, have two major factors in common: successful suppression of the virus followed by sluggish vaccination strategies.