Article ID: CBB527253772

COVID-19 Exceptionalism: Explaining South Korean Responses (2022)

unapi

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.

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Authors & Contributors
Simonutti, Luisa
Lievevrouw, Elisa
Fernando Rosa
John Aggrey
Samanta Alarcón-Arcos
Abou Traore
Concepts
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Pandemics
Medicine and society
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Medicine
Public health
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
Places
South Korea
Japan
Taiwan
United Kingdom
Hong Kong
Singapore
Institutions
Google (firm)
Apple (firm)
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