Public Health in Asia during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Health, Migrant Labour, and International Health Crises.

• Author: Tayeb, Azmil

Public Health in Asia during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Health, Migrant Labour, and International Health Crises. Edited by Anoma P. van der Veere, Florian Schneider and Catherine Yukping Lo. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Hardcover: 272pp.

During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian countries were praised for their quick and decisive measures to curb the fast-spreading virus. Though tough and highly restrictive, these measures were necessary to see countries through the unprecedented public health crisis. Many attributed the early success of Asian countries' pandemic policies to their "national culture", which tends to be more "collective" and "consensus-based", as reflected in their high degrees of power inequality and uncertainty avoidance in the indexes established by social psychologist Geert Hofstede. The suggestion here, in other words, is that countries in Asia were effective in containing the spread of COVID-19 because their populations are compliant and risk-averse, have a strong respect for authorities and value consensus-building over individualism.

This volume, edited by Anoma P. van der Veere, Florian Schneider and Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, sets out to debunk the sweeping generalization that Asian countries were better at managing the pandemic due to their particular "national culture[s]" (pp. 12-13). While being a collective-oriented society certainly helped with the smooth implementation of pandemic policies--compared to the socio-political disarray seen in many Western countries during the first wave of the pandemic--it is not a satisfactory explanation as to why the approach taken by Asian countries was quite effective. Lest we forget, Asian countries experienced pandemic threats before, most notably in 2003 during the SARS virus outbreak. That experience forced many Asian countries to strengthen their pandemic preparedness and responses, which were already in place when COVID-19 arrived in March 2020.

The transnational nature of the pandemic required coordination among neighbouring countries. In Southeast Asia, ASEAN played a key role. In Chapter Two, Kei Koga details the challenges faced by ASEAN in coordinating a concerted pandemic response among its member states, including the region's dependence on external actors for resources, its geostrategic position of being sandwiched between the interests of China and the United States and the "ASEAN Way" of getting things done...