COVID-19 has presented challenges across the globe that led to a number of shared lessons to be learnt. Yet, we are inundated with comparative accounts that characterize national pandemic responses as inherent and unique to certain nation states, which, we argue, led to COVID-exceptionalism. This article challenges “cultural” explanations of South Korea’s “successful” responses to COVID-19 crisis. The popular narrative has been that Korea’s cluster-based mitigation strategy was sustained by rigorous contact tracing and mass testing systems, and this was made possible by three distinctive elements of pandemic preparedness: 1) Korean “culture” of normalizing face-covering, 2) Korean citizens’ consensus of prioritizing public health to privacy, and 3) Korea’s IT infrastructure enabling efficient digital contact tracing. By debunking the three myths, we demonstrate why neither the Asian “authoritarian advantages” thesis nor the counter-argument of “Asian civility” adequately captures the reality of Korea’s reaction to the COVID pandemic. The ways in which risks are conceptualized as manageable objects produce particular modes of allocating responsibilities for risk mitigation, when dealing with a relatively unknown virus. COVID-exceptionalism may cause not only the issue of reinforcing “(East) Asian”/“Western” stereotypes, but also other problems such as implicitly granting political impunity to those responsible for coordinating COVID-19 responses.
Keywords:
The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that no country was fully prepared nor has managed a perfect system in responding to the complex social, economic, and epidemic crises brought by this novel virus (Moon et al. Citation2020). There is a growing awareness that SARS-CoV-2 shows similar patterns of transmission over time that were dealt with by similar interventions around the globe, although with varying degrees of effectiveness, and eventually exposed similar weaknesses in social safety nets in the process (e.g. Paremoer et al. Citation2021). However, despite the enormity of the shared experiences and the importance of universal lessons for future pandemics, we see a persistent narrative of why and how each nation was different in their responses to the COVID-19 crisis. This paper grew out of two authors’ shared concern about this very popular yet flawed narrative. As going through three national lockdowns in the UK (Author 1) and constant changes in social restriction measures in South Korea (Author 2), both authors realized how things were similar rather than radically different in our respective countries. Yet, we were inundated with, by the media and experts alike, comparative and even competitive discourses to characterize national pandemic preparedness and responses as inherent and unique to certain nation states, which we eventually decided to call Covid-exceptionalism. Author 2 became increasingly inquisitive of what it means to say that South Korea (hereafter, Korea) is “a country that beat the virus,” as a British television documentary with the same title put it, when there exists little consensus on how to measure success, failure, and/or latent consequences in COVID-response/prevention. Evaluating the overall cost of a pandemic is not a simple matter as we need to consider not only what are conceptualized as risks to manage but also to whom responsibilities for epidemic risk management are un/fairly allocated (Colmer Citation2020; Coronini-Cronberg, Maile, and Majeed Citation2020). Meanwhile, as an East Asian living in the UK, Author 1 became tired of being asked by her local friends whether Korea was dealing with the COVID-19 crisis better because Korean people are generally submissive to government rules.
