'A mess in America': Why Asia now looks safer than the US in the coronavirus crisis
By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times
The 44-year-old American writer, who moved to this island city-state with her family eight years ago, worried that their adopted home would be ravaged again by a runaway disease and that the school where her husband teaches and their 12-year-old son studies would be closed. She feared food shortages, overwhelmed hospitals and travel bans.
But her husband persuaded her not to flee. Two months later, Singapore and other Asian nations have largely corralled their outbreaks while the virus roars across North America and Europe, leaving Grant dumbstruck at how quickly the U.S. went from a distant spectator of the epidemic to one of its primary victims.
“It feels very strange to say that I feel safer here than in my home country,” Grant said. “That sinking feeling that it was really going to get awful, that we were all going to get infected, that just didn’t happen. Things never really got bad in Singapore, and obviously they’re a mess in America.”
In Asian countries that initially faced the gravest risk from the coronavirus, the shambolic U.S. response to the pandemic has elicited confusion, horror and even a measure of pity. Suddenly, it seems, the U.S. is the basket case, an aloof, inward-looking power that has weakened its alliances, failed to lead on global emergencies such as climate change and shrunk in a crisis.
The U.S. was quick to restrict travel from China in the early weeks of the outbreak; now travelers from the U.S. are exporting a “second wave” of infections to China, Hong Kong and Singapore. President Trump, who once said the virus would disappear “like a miracle,” has watched it explode in California, Washington state and New York while vigilant testing and contact tracing brought it under control in Taiwan and South Korea.
As commercial shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders grind life to a halt in the United States’ biggest cities, restaurants, bars, shopping malls and subway trains have operated virtually without interruption in Singapore and Taipei, Taiwan — the occasional mask and thermometer gun the only obvious signs of a pandemic. Emerging outbreaks in India and Indonesia, huge populations where little testing has been done, now worry experts more than China and its immediate surroundings.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Sunday, March 22nd 2020 at 11:05AM
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