Item — HN Reader

it isn't really hard to understand. The Chinese want to protect themselves and their loved ones so they expect themselves and others to self quarantine. Similar culture can be found across Taiwan, Korea and South East Asia so as you can see the pandemic is controlled in similar fashion. What the government does is to enforce what the public think is right to prevent the public from executing the offender themselves.

This is a different culture from the West where people are expected only to protect themselves but there is no expectation for others to protect you.

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This clearly doesn't explain Western countries (Australia, NZ) where very hard lockdowns worked quite well.

I live in Sydney Australia so I can provide some perspective.

Lockdowns only seem to be effective when coupled with efficient testing, tracing, isolating and the use of face masks. At the moment the Delta strain is challenging this idea though. Cases here are plateauing or rising slowly and we are lockdown.

Culturally there is more emphasis on the individual in western cultures vs the collective in eastern cultures. Perhaps due to historical religious differences. This clearly has an effect on things like mask wearing, self isolation, coming forward for testing and complying with lockdowns.

While Australians generally aren’t as community minded as those in Asian countries they aren’t as individualistic as those in say the USA. This is clearly evidenced in the average Australians view towards gun control for instance.

I live in Adelaide.

Lockdowns work well, Sydney was just too slow to act. Look at any epidemiological model and it pretty clear new cases will be emerging for a while yet. The real solution is the vaccine of course.

But the point is that in both the long Melbourne and now Sydney lockdowns the majority of the population has been pretty happy with the approach.

In both cases there were protests, but in both cases there were equal numbers asking for the government to lock down earlier than it did.