COVID-19: Looking toward the US from South Korea
It’s so often gone down like this: I come into class with a hoarse voice, the sniffles, or a cough, and just a few minutes into the lesson, one brave, wide-eyed student speaks up:
“Teacher… are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I reply. “I’m fine, thanks. I just caught a cold.”
“Oh.” The student then sizes me up with what appears to be real concern. “Did you go to the hospital?”
“The hospital?” I nearly spit out my sip of coffee. “Uh, no. I have a cold… not cancer. I’ll be okay. Thank you.”
“Oh, I understand. But you still must see a doctor. And take the medicine.”
This used to annoy me. What was the point in telling me to go to the hospital for something as trivial as the common cold? It’s not like there was a cure. Was the doctor supposed to write me a prescription for chicken soup?
Over time, however, my perspective began to shift. I became aware that not only were these well-meaning students inquiring into my health from a place of actual concern, but that they had a very different relationship with their national healthcare apparatus than I did mine. South Korea is blessed with a comprehensive, government-sponsored health scheme, available to all, and, while not entirely free, stupidly cheap when it comes to basic care. There are hospitals and clinics everywhere, all filled with educated, trained professionals, not to mention the very best in modern technical equipment. Koreans are used to having easy access to top-notch care for even the most trifling of health concerns, so why should I be surprised when they suggest the same for me?
When the COVID-19 initially made its entrance onto the world stage in late 2019, most of us shrugged. After all, it was just another Chinese virus in a string that always managed to rock East Asia a bit but never really jacked up the rest of the world. SARS? Bird flu? Swine flu? All “Chinese” sicknesses that never really caught fire on a massive scale. This, of course, also came with a heaping tablespoon of good ol’ fashioned racism: They’re getting sick because they eat fried bats and pangolin testicles. Those dirty Chinese brought it on themselves.
These allegations were not only whispered online, but also carried by major news organs, despite a dearth of evidence. But this idea that COVID-19 was somehow China’s own fault and that “just some Chinese people” would fall victim to it was the blazing subtext of the early edition of this story. So many of us just thought it would run its course in China, with only Chinese people and a Chinese economy taking the hit. Oh, the naivete.
I traveled to Japan in late January on a writing assignment. At this point, Wuhan was already shut down, but China wasn’t. The streets of Osaka and Sapporo were still full of Chinese tourists, and while there were masks a-plenty deployed by nationalities of all stripes, no one seemed that worried. Like the other viral brush fires, we’d get through this. There was no need to cancel regular life, was there?
Soon after I got back to Korea things changed. A cult-y church up in Daegu, just north of where I am, experienced an outbreak and suddenly it was on. I recall my wife on the phone with her mother, chattering in machine-gun Korean about the rapidly unwinding situation. I couldn’t understand it all, but it didn’t take me too long to piece together that this thing had arrived on the peninsula with a BOOM! I just sighed and expected South Korea — one of the most densely populated countries on the planet — to be overwhelmed. This is a place where people routinely ride motorcycles on the sidewalk, where loogie spitting is a religion, and eating and drinking in close confines pretty much defines the culture. How the hell was the whole country not going to get infected?
During that first week of the outbreak I could definitely smell the fear. There was a run on food at a few big stores but the shelves didn’t stay empty for long. The most unnerving thing was the barrage of text messages from the government telling us the exact locations where infected patients had visited. While this seemed alarming at first, it was just simply a way of telling us specific places to avoid, which is quite smart, really.
What we saw, and are still seeing, is that despite a couple of initial stumbles, the system in place is largely working. The South Korean government responded rapidly and intelligently, implementing a plan that had already been tested during the MERS epidemic a few years back. Clusters were immediately identified and isolated. Everyone in the country was kept abreast of developments in real time, and testing began a massive scale.
Identify the problem and contain it. That seems to be the M.O. and South Korea is now looked to as a glimmering example of how to go about stopping coronavirus. But it hasn’t come easy: schools are still closed, and small businesses are definitely taking a hit, especially restaurants, cafes, and bars. Masks are in short supply but are still available in pharmacies across the country through a government rationing system.
I’ve been officially shut-in for a few weeks now, though I usually get out every day to walk the city or even hike up into the mountains. Busan was never hit hard by COVID-19; I think we’ve had about 100 cases here, most of which flared up in a single church, but still, the virus has shown up in numbers large enough to make you sweat. That said, there are people in the streets; the markets are open and thriving; construction continues and life is going on with at least a semblance of normality. I’ve been told this is the case with most of the country, except Daegu — the epicenter of the virus — which still remains in a state of semi-lockdown.
So it appears that Korea, while not yet out of the woods, has weathered this thing about as good as a country can, given the fact that they suffered a direct hit. The much-feared zombie apocalypse never arrived, despite the histrionics of some fear-mongering expat newbies and drama queens.
We have the actual Korean people to thank for that, as well as their leadership: President Moon Jae-in, despite a shaky start, has handled this crisis with a cool head and a steady hand. That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his detractors: South Korea is a deeply polarized society, politically, but I think anyone with no skin in the game would have to agree that Moon is exactly the kind of leader you’d like to have come disaster time. You only have to look across the ocean to consider the alternative.
I’ve lived out of the country for a long time now, so most of the information I get about the USA is viewed through the prism of social media and the internet. This may warp my view and confirm my biases, but from the relative stability of my home office here in South Korea, what’s going on back home appears to be nothing short of a raging tire fire. The coronavirus is likely sweeping across the country in numbers that we can only guess at, but I’d bet it’s in the tens of thousands now. At least.
Now the United States is a massive country with five times as many people as South Korea; it’s much more decentralized and has a very different set of cultural mores, so to compare the two may be an exercise in apples and oranges. Still, there are fundamental things at work here, and what we’re seeing in the States, more than anything else, is a crisis of leadership.
At risk of saying “we told you so,” most of us have seen this coming from light years away. We’ve known all along that the current occupant of the White House was himself a calamity of a man: a dolt, a vainglorious, incurious, incapable pile of radioactive human garbage. We knew from before day one that Donald Trump was barely capable of zipping up the fly on his weird diaper-like mega khakis, let alone pilot the ship through a national crisis. If he were the assistant manager at Olive Garden he would have been gone ages ago. But somehow, through the slavering devotion of his cult of dumb-dumbs, combined with the feckless opportunism of the Republican Party, he still clutches the reins, and now we have the absolute worst person calling the shots. It beggars belief that, in a nation of over 300 million souls, this is the best we can do.
Where do we even begin? Donald Trump has been awful since the moment he polluted the White House with his noxious presence, but since the coronavirus crisis his callousness and ineptitude has been laid bare. He initially called the corona a “hoax,” and then later, in a massive dog whistle blast, referred to it as a “foreign virus.” He closed the White House pandemic office and plans to gut funding for the Center for Disease Control. He gave a labored, monotonous speech to the nation that was so void of empathy and free of competence that it only succeeded in making everyone feel worse. The markets responded with freefall. And finally, when he was out of new lies, he reached into recesses of his rancid ass and pulled out an old standby: “The black guy did it. Blame Obama.”
I realize that I’ve made a sudden turn down dreaded I Hate Trump Avenue, but it’s impossible to divorce what’s going in America from this utter failure in leadership. I’m not saying that everything would be going perfectly if Obama were still in power or Hillary Clinton had managed to win, but things would be measurably better. And even if testing was still widely unavailable and unaffordable, either of these leaders would have managed a speech to the nation that would have at least begun to assuage the people’s collective anxiety, rather than remind them of just how fucked they may be.
We don’t know how bad this will get in the U.S., though I suspect a lot of people will get infected. What is happening, other than people being reminded of just how loathsome Donald Trump is, is that the failings of the American health systems are getting lit up by the spotlight of the world. If this COVID-19 isn’t an argument for Medicare for All, I don’t know what will be. Hopefully this will give that wagon a push through the mud.
Despite my exhortations of Trump and the government’s response to this mess, I know that the US has some of the best health care facilities in the world, along with dedicated professionals who are currently working on the front lines to help contain this thing. There are also numerous mayors, governors, university/hospital administrators and others who, despite a void in leadership from up top, have taken it on their own to get the gears moving and inspire people to help. Governor Jay Inslee of my home state of Washington has been one of those who has stepped up to show us what real leadership looks like.
Also, through that skewed prism of Facebook, I have seen countless friends reaching out, offering to help out with child care, to deliver food, or support to so many in the hospitality, entertainment, and gig economy who are about to take a colossal financial hit here. This, of course, warms my admittedly cynical cockles, and reminds me that the most important thing is the people around you.
Still, it helps to have a government that’s invested the planning and resources to face an emergency like this head on. If they haven’t, then perhaps hoarding toilet paper isn’t such a bad thing, since you’re going to need to clean up all that shit once it hits the fan.
