The article points out the COVID-19 outbreak as a complex system, and the shortcomings of the administration’s efforts towards addressing and alleviating the situation due to a-systemic thinking. It talks about their inability to anticipate second and third-order effects of actions that create unwanted or even catastrophic ripples in the system. The article places an emphasis on government directives as a response to the situation, and only towards its end briefly mentions the significance of impact at the individual level. No more does it address the socio-cultural forces at large, which determine social behaviour and indirectly the effectiveness with which the virus spreads. This is crucial because the situation at the national level is based on the spreading which takes place at the individual level.
The article discusses the case of Hongkong, where despite an ‘unresponsive government’, ‘great popular pressure and people’s own actions – immediate adoption of social distancing in January, universal mask-wearing, calling for closures and cancellations even when the government dragged its feet’ – have kept its number of cases low and under control by adequate healthcare response. Such individual behaviour is beyond government directives; it is in the country’s culture and history. For Hongkong, memories of the recent and devastating SARS virus prompt greater urgency when it comes to measures of precaution. The people become more paranoid, but that gets them to be more careful, which makes it harder for the virus to spread. Just a few days ago, Times published an article – ‘Why Wearing a Face Mask Is Encouraged in Asia, but Shunned in the U.S.’ While the question of whether masks are effective and should be worn by the general public is not my focus, such a headline exemplifies the different situations in which the pandemic occurs, culturally and socially.