by liberal japonicus
I wrote to Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo (and he immediately wrote back with a gracious response. I should also add that they are keeping all their COVID reporting outside their paywall, but they are hoping to get more subscribers, so you may want to consider it) about this statement here.
[South Korea’s] model is one that should be adaptable to the US, at least from a technological and civil liberties perspective.
I disagreed with that a bit and I thought I would post what I wrote so folks could share what their own communities are or aren’t doing.
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The reasons [why this isn’t adapatable to the US] I would give are as follows
Reason 1- The surveillance society massively greater than the US as is the Korean populace’s acceptance of it. I can’t believe that people in the US would even begin to tolerate the level of CCTV, card tracking, etc, that is used in Korea and if what does exist were deployed in some sort of makeshift network, the pushback would be immediate. While Koreans (and Japanese) make vague nods to privacy, it is the form rather than the actual substance, so ‘face’ can be preserved, but the capacity to track individuals down is still retained. That has allowed Korea to do contract tracking in a way that would be impossible in the US
Reason 2- Koreans respect the elderly in a way that doesn’t obtain in the US. I think this drives the much greater acceptance of measures that would be scoffed at in the US. My impression has been that the younger generation, despite the disgust with kkondae, the idea of ignoring the pandemic because it doesn’t seem to effect young people to any great extent has not gotten any traction, whereas I get that impression from reading a lot of US reportage. A similar dynamic plays out in China and Japan where they discuss how getting older people to stop going out is more difficult than getting young people to follow suggestions.
Reason 3- Group dynamics in Asian societies are quite different from the West. Most foreigners have realized that despite the fact that masks are not effective except in cases of preventing others getting sick, wearing a mask becomes an indicator that you are socially conscious. Korea and Japan don’t have people complaining how everyone is fooled and not doing the right things. A mask becomes more like an ‘I gave’ sticker you get for doing blood donation, and when it is taken up by a majority of the population, it has a much greater effect than if it is simply done by a small minority.
Reason 4- National health The Korean efforts are based on a foundation of a national health system and its absence in the US makes it impossible to scaffold the intiatives that underlie them
Reasons 4 and 5 Geography and public transport South Korea’s geography and highly utilized public transport network provides ways to enforce many of the measures that would be impossible in the US.
This is not simply a ‘Korea is different from the US’ argument. It is that I think the features of Korea set up a situation where the US would have difficulty adapting a lot of the things that were done in Korea, and they would not get the same mileage. This would create a situation where the measures would seemingly fail, encouraging those who insist that the virus is a hoax and driving that portion of the electorate to ignore or circumvent the measures.
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Josh Marshall was (and always is) quite careful in how he states it so this might be one of those ‘small differences make big arguments’, but I have a hard time seeing the US adopt much of the South Korean model, even if there were acceptance of the fact of a pandemic (which there isn’t). Anyway, a newer thread to talk about COVID-19. Happy happy joy joy…
I think you are right in what you argue.
Having said that, people in the Us seem to accept (at least to the extent of doing little about it) to accept just this kind of pervasive tracking by private companies. Something probably worth unpacking at greater length.
Along these lines, and your interesting juxtaposition in the last thread, I note that the Japanese government does not currently have the power to enforce quarantine on its citizens, and is only now putting legislation through parliament.
Korea reported another low in terms of new infections today (the considerably more repressive China did likewise, with no new domestic infections outside of Hubei (a couple of travellers for the UK and Spain were diagnosed at the airport).
Meanwhile…
Japan’s COVID-19 infections much higher than reported, says NIID
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/07/national/japans-covid-19-infections-much-higher-reported-niid/#.XmcfuS-nyhA
The real number of COVID-19 infections in Japan is likely several times higher than government reports are indicating nationwide, a specialist in infectious diseases says.
Motoi Suzuki, head of the Infectious Disease Surveillance Center at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, was referring Friday to estimates by a health ministry team….
The current inability of western democracies to get to grips with the outbreak in an effective manner will become very troubling, if it gets out of hand as it has in Italy.
I’ve really enjoyed your recent reporting LJ.
While I think you’re right overall, I’m not sure that (1) and (2) are right. We collect so much data, and, with the flip of a switch, we could collect so much more. If the federal government passed an emergency powers law, Google and Facebook could give realtime location histories for many Americans to a government quarantine authority. It wouldn’t be difficult. But they probably wouldn’t do it without some legal protection. We’ve already sacrificed our privacy for advertising dollars; too bad we can’t get any public health benefits from it as well.
As for (2), putting aside how Koreans regard the elderly versus Americans, young people in the US have other reasons to worry about COVID-19. Young folk without healthcare can be utterly devastated by even a “survivable” bout if they need to be hospitalized. And they still have parents and grandparents that can die. And many people have at least one young-but-not-entirely-healthy person. American media are run by sociopaths so I often have trouble inferring what normal (non-sociopathic) folk believe based on media reports.
Unfortunately, (3)-(5) seem right and I think they’ll dominate. The land of rolling-coal is not well suited for pro-social behaviors like self-quarantines and wearing face masks.
We discussed this at my employer yesterday and the result was that (1) our company leadership is monitoring and planning but only willing to cut unnecessary travel and (2) my boss has declared that anyone who wants to work from home for the next few weeks can do so with his full support, no questions asked. My old college is nearby and I’ve heard that the administration is serious considering shutting down the physical campus entirely, including closing all dormitories which would be disastrous for international students. So people are starting to act, but given other countries’ experience, still very slowly.
If you visit maps.google.com, click on the three horizontal bars in the upper left and the select “Your Timeline”, you can see Google’s location history (pick a recent day in the timeline in the upper right). For me, it is a mix of terrifyingly insightful and kind of dumb. It know exactly when I went to my house, it knows that I went to my child’s daycare (which it identifies by name!), when we got there, when I left, when I arrived at the bus station, that I took a bus and then walked to work (and it knows by employer by name!), and then it shows me coming home.
The dumb bits are that it thinks I walked slowly home over several hours (reader, I did not) but it really got most of this right. And if someone told Google, “This is an emergency”, Google could flip a switch and reduce battery life by 10% and get much higher fidelity location histories. Right now, the dominant factors in how much location history big companies in the US collect and store are (1) power costs and (2) legal fear. Those can both go away for a time.
lj, all those reasons make sense. But I think you overlook (perhaps due to tact?) a critical Reason 6: xenophobia and racism. The people most inclined to resist these, or any other, public health measures are also those most likely to resist taking any damn furriners as a model. Especially foreigners who are not even European.
Which is to say, even if you somehow got general agreement to anything like this, saying “It’s modeled on Korea” would be sufficient kill it for a significant chunk of the population. Not just because we shouldn’t adopt foriegn ideas, but because those ideas are, by definition, bad and should be avoided at all costs.
You are probably right about that Turbulence, and while what they do with internet in Korea is pretty astonishing, the infrastructure itself is quite old and creaky and I’m sure that US companies could easily outpace Korea if they were permitted. But the Koreans have been a lot more willing to post detailed timelines for people and I wonder if they would do that for a person like Cruz or Gaetz for example. And I also think that the horse is already out of the barn, the US (like Japan) has no real idea of the extent of the outbreak and tracking contacts is probably meaningless now.
I also agree that younger people do have connections with older people, but the constant wearing down of trust in scientists and the idea that everyone wants to stay young forever, I think Americans are more likely to dismiss the problem until it is too late and then, the failure of those measures would be assumed to be someone else’s fault rather than theirs. If they/we are lucky, it will disappear with the warmer weather, but places like Singapore, Kuwait, Dubai and Bahrain have cases, so that’s probably not true.
wj, you are right, II can’t see the US giving credit, but if they did follow the Korean model, it would be touted as something truly unique for America and if it screws up, it will be because foreigners did something wrong.
In America, armchair epidemiologists decry things like the cancellations of parades as the fault of snowflakes who are afraid to just live their lives. (But you’re not a snowflake if you think a parade being cancelled is the end of the world.)
I even heard a doctor for one of the Philly pro-sports teams talking about how maybe old or sick people shouldn’t attend sporting events, but that young, healthy people have a different risk-reward calculation. (You know, because it’s only about whether you will die of COVID-19.)
So, yeah, the land of rolling-coal is about right.
(On a side note, I don’t see trucks rolling coal like I did a number of years ago, but it could be that the law caught up with the coal-rollers in my neck of the woods at some point.)
If you visit maps.google.com, click on the three horizontal bars in the upper left and the select “Your Timeline”, you can see Google’s location history
it doesn’t know anything about me. i have my phone set to only tell Google where i am when i have Google maps open (which is almost never)
NC just declared a state of emergency.
right now it just means the state is asking for federal help $.
We have had so many “states of emergency” over the years (often for quite localized natural events) that the term doesn’t have the freight that in might, in the abstract, suggest. As cleek notes, it’s now traditional that it’s just a request for Federal FEMA funds. Not sure what we do to indicate a real emergency.
it doesn’t know anything about me.
LOL.
I don’t have a smart phone, because I’m too cheap to pay for the data plan. So Google knows my home address, and a couple of places I’ve been to on vacation over the last five years. And, a place I don’t work at anymore.
works for me.
So, yeah, the land of rolling-coal is about right.
Back when the ACA was being debated, I remember reading something in the NYT that featured some guy in the midwest offering his thoughts.
His sister was on Medicaid for some fairly dire medical condition. Without the Medicaid assistance, she’d basically be screwed, possibly dead, minimally she would suffer unnecessarily and live a profoundly limited life.
He recognized all of that, and didn’t actually want his sister to not have what the federal assistance provided to her, but he also thought it wasn’t right for government to be involved in that stuff, at least not the feds, and if that meant his sister’s Medicaid would go away he could understand that and basically agree with it.
I basically just don’t understand that point of view. I mean, I follow the basic logic of it, but I have a hard time arriving at the logical conclusion without thinking “no, this is not where we want to end up”.
If it’s not where you want to end up, the logical consistency seems kind of beside the point. To me.
So the whole “government sucks, live free or die” thing is kind of lost on me. Including the coal rolling part, mostly because it’s kind of dickish, and who wants to be a dick? I mean, making fart noises is funny when you’re 11, but don’t we all want to progress beyond being 11 at some point?
If folks want something done about COVID-19 they should probably look to their towns, cities, counties, and states. The feds are going to flail and quite possibly make things worse, because there is no critical mass of agreement at the federal level that actually doing something useful and effective is in their wheelhouse.
I basically just don’t understand that point of view. I mean, I follow the basic logic of it, but I have a hard time arriving at the logical conclusion without thinking “no, this is not where we want to end up”.
If it’s not where you want to end up, the logical consistency seems kind of beside the point. To me.
I’d say that logical consistency is entirely the point.
If you follow your principles to their logical conclusion, and end up somewhere you don’t want to be, this is a clue. About as subtle a clue as a 2×4 upside the head. It’s a clue that you need to seriously reexamine your principles. Seriously and urgently.
Well this is fun.
And afterwards, the fact that more of them got ill and died will be proof, proof!, that it was a plot by Democrats all along.
far too optimistic, wj. Most people will recover and so Republicans will then trumpet that the Dems overhyped it. And the fact that you wrote “more of them got ill and died” will be tweeted as proof that you just want Republicans to die.
Except, I’m a Republican. (Probably have been longer than my accuser has been alive.) Oops.
Sure, most people will recover. But as wide as it looks to be spreading, most people will also know someone (relative, coworker, friend) who got really sick; and a lot will know personally someone who died. “Overhyped” just isn’t going to play for anyone who hasn’t totally lost all contact with reality. (Admittedly a depressingly large number.)
Except, I’m a Republican. (Probably have been longer than my accuser has been alive.)
You think that is going to make a difference?
Don’t know if it makes a difference. But I get some small amusement out of watching the frantically trying to regroup. Because they appear to feel compelled to. Petty of me, I know.