Lessons from Asia on COVID-19

This month, the United States crossed the tragic threshold of suffering more than one million deaths from COVID-19. Over the course of the pandemic, the United States has experienced one of the highest mortality rates from COVID-19 of any high-income country. In contrast, some high-income Asian settings, including Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, have experienced remarkably low COVID-19 mortality when compared to the United States and many European countries. How did these locations in Asia achieve this success? How did they approach the pandemic differently? What can the U.S. and the world learn from Asia’s COVID-19 response? What were some shortcomings of the response in these settings? Drs. Peter Chang and Jeremy Lim will discuss the local COVID-19 response in Taiwan and Singapore. Dr. James Maguire, who was deployed to China as part of a World Health Organization team during the 2002-2003 SARS 1 epidemic, will discuss lessons from that epidemic. Dr. Michelle Ko discuss how anti-Asian racism has shaped media and policy discussions of COVID-19 and undermined the U.S. public health domestic response to the pandemic. Dean Joyce Sackey will moderate a discussion among the panelists.