Abstract
This article discusses national and local strategies for confronting COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis sheds light on how societal context, institutional arrangements, knowledge culture, and technology deployment manifest in national responses to the pandemic. Discussion describes country cases from East and South East Asia, on the one hand, and from Europe and Asia-Pacific, on the other. The overall impression is that Asian cases reflect proactivity and diligence, while Western responses are reactive and more often than not slightly delayed. Both country groups include successes, while the overwhelming majority of global benchmarks are Asian. As the management of COVID-19 crisis is essentially a multi-level governance issue, discussion about national strategies is supplemented with a glance at the role of cities. The COVID-19-related urban challenges revolve around increased interest in urban safety, creative approaches to and the uses of urban space, the rise of digital urban platforms, and deeper insights on citizen engagement.
Highlights
The year 2020 will be remembered as the year of the global spread of coronavirus disease
Coronavirus disease 2019, abbreviated to COVID-19, is a shorter name given to a novel virus identified as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)
Countries should be relevant in terms of government responses to COVID-19 and form a few rather small and coherent groups
Summary
The year 2020 will be remembered as the year of the global spread of coronavirus disease. The times like the COVID-19 crisis, particular additional elements to such a context include a high degree of uncertainty, sensitiveness of political situation, disputes over stringent policy measures, and uncertainties regarding the duration and termination of exceptional measures Another feature that characterizes pandemics is the likely fatality of government’s non-decision making. The findings of national and local cases were analyzed against academic and professional views of government responses to epidemics, with special reference to strategies that aim at minimizing the risk of transmissions and slowing down the spread of infectious diseases The aim of such an analysis is to make sense of an exceptional case of COVID-19 regarding government policies, and provide tentative empirically grounded insights into understanding and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the factual policies adopted by case countries and further assessing tentatively the relevance of contextual interpretation along East-West dichotomy
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