By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
My university colleagues in China, except for three localities, have gone back to full regular classes. They usually have two months of summer vacation, but this year it will only be three weeks. They extended the spring semester into July and will begin fall semester a week early in order to catch up.
Face-to-face schools are also resuming in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, New Zealand and Germany. Why is the rest of the world still tackling COVID-19?
A combination of three reasons has allowed them to return to some normalcy.
Nearly everyone in Asia carries a smartphone. This allowed them to use a smartphone app that everyone downloaded. It is used for instantaneous contact tracing. Each person’s phone detects and keeps the phone ID of any other person’s phone that comes within six feet. When a person is diagnosed with COVID-19, their phone can immediately notify all those who had been in that close proximity in the last five days to quarantine. It also color-codes those person’s phone with red (positive = strict quarantine), yellow (came near an infected person so go home and self isolate) and green (healthy).
This was most strictly enforced in Taiwan but works well in the other Confucian-heritage Asian countries. That is because the second factor is their strong feelings of responsibility that each person feels for others around them and especially for family and classmates. The golden rule proclaiming that “you should act towards others as you would want them to act toward you” was first stated over 500 years BC by Confucius and continues as a cultural value despite the various political systems involved. This also includes greater respect for the elderly and respect for teachers. Therefore we see Asian languages interpreting what we call “rights” as what their languages call “responsibilities.” They are also crowded countries with three to five times more people per area than in the U.S. They are “interdependent.”
Does that mean that on average, Asian cultures care more about others than Western cultures do. Well, yes. That is proven by how willing their populations are to shelter-in-place once a danger was understood. This was particularly true in the first two months when there were not yet tests and the smartphone app was not yet available. When our Western press interviews in Asia, they fail to comprehend the replies they receive from medical personnel about how Asians are more concerned about others and more willing to quarantine. They have been wearing face masks for decades out of concern for others around them.
But New Zealand and Germany are different. There is a larger Asian population in New Zealand than in North America or Europe, but it is not the majority. Yet, being a relatively small nation, it did succeed in a strict lockdown that eliminated cases. Now their problem is preventing the import of new cases, a problem China still faces.
However, Germany lacks the Confucian ethic and yet has done very well controlling this pandemic. Here the third critical factor is science education. For generations, Germans have received the most advanced education on human anatomy and physiology, plus disease microbiology, in public school. Therefore, the average citizen can self-refer themselves to a medical specialist when they feel ill. Germany has a scientist at the head of their government and a population that knows three times more science than Americans.
Therefore we now have Asian countries watching the international news, observing the disasters in America and Brazil and asking “Don’t they care about their fellow citizens, and especially their medical workers?” And we have Germany watching our news and asking “Don’t they understand science?”
By our group actions, we show that indeed a critical mass of Americans are science illiterate. We will await a vaccine as our cure-all. Except there is a problem there also. Second only to the Taliban, Americans have the highest level of anti-vaxxers, perhaps 50 percent. And that falls far short of achieving herd immunity.
. . .
John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.