> But they were right to say it wasn't a pandemic, because it wasn't one yet. It was in China. You could see it. > The east Asian countries have been tough on

> But they were right to say it wasn't a pandemic, because it wasn't one yet. It was in China. You could see it. > The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it Only two of them. Japan and Korea weren't - Japanese people wear face masks mostly because of pollen allergies. > and they have a more community/society bent than the western world. I listed four completely different countries. (Also, IME Japanese people are actually more individualistic than Americans. Though they pretend they aren't.) > They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health. Japan's policies involved no such thing, in fact they have fewer legal powers than US public health officers do and explicitly said this was the reason they didn't do several things we did. Nevertheless, they were both successful and reversed policies a lot less often than we did. It mostly involved discouraging large crowds indoors ("C3") but not what you'd call "lockdown". > Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't? We don't need to construct a cause, since you do that to predict an outcome, but we could already observe different outcomes from the different growth rate.