The Seven Habits of COVID-Resilient Nations
The tweet has stuck with me for months now: a chart of cumulative COVID-19 deaths per capita in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. The U.S. and U.K. lines rise up like mountains relative to the valley of South Korea below. Even as Omicron-related deaths have increased in South Korea more recently, the picture hasn’t changed much.
South Korea “kept deaths 40 times lower all the way till 75% of population fully vaccinated,” the physician Vincent Rajkumar marveled on Twitter in response to the chart. “This is success.”
A more apt word than success might be resilience. As I have previously argued, the COVID crisis has underscored that clout in the 21st century—an era rife with systemic threats including climate change, cyberattacks, and economic crises—will depend on a country’s ability to anticipate and absorb large-scale shocks, adapt to their disruptions, and rapidly bounce back (or even forward) from them. It will depend on “resilient power.” And through its response to the coronavirus so far, South Korea has emerged as a paragon of resilience governance.
South Korea hasn’t proved to be the only resilient power in this period; other standouts New Zealand and the Nordic countries. Yet South Korea is unusual in that it has not only repeatedly suppressed the spread of the virus from the crisis than most other major economies. In contrast to other countries that excelled at one stage of the pandemic but struggled at others, South Korea has somehow every stage. After a sluggish start to its vaccine campaign, it now has . South Korea has also amassed by providing pandemic-related assistance to other countries and establishing itself as a model for how democracies should contend with COVID-19.
