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\ EPTS GAZETTE

In contrast, The U.S. government thinks of the pandemic as often a secondary issue in the
country with a lot of attention being paid to the economic consequences of the pandemic.
President Trump has justified Covid-19 as “China Virus” and blamed the outbreak on foreign-
ers. Early on the government just recommended Americans to wash their hands and quaran-
tine themselves. Other countries like the UK have talked about herd immunity being allowed
to build up for when the second wave of the coronavirus hits, suggesting they see this as a long
term strategy to fight the pandemic meaning most of their citizens would be immune to the
disease and the economy could get back to some kind of normality.

In Thailand, the government has tried to balance between the economy and healthcare by pro-
viding subsidies for Thai citizen’s electricity and water bills which help to keep the nation’s
economy afloat. However, this financial help is very small in comparison to what European and
the U.S. governments have given out in financial aid, in hope that it will encourage citizens to
stay at home. For the healthcare side,Asian governments have had to be a lot more pro-active
because there are often no universal health care systems. Thailand declared many quarantine
rules and preventive measures such as restricted curfew hours for certain age groups and con-
trolled flight plans for the airlines. Many workers were also told to work from home if they
could. In Europe and the U.S. where workers have been unable to work from home the govern-
ments have set out economic aid packages that encourage these workers to be furloughed for
up to three months.

TEST, TRACK AND TRACE

Different countries have different approaches to testing, tracking and tracing CoronaVirus.
Some countries choose to test every suspicious person because they have enough Corona test-
ing kids. On the other hand, some countries were too slow to test and the Coronavirus spread
is now widespread throughout the community.

South Korea has been very successful in testing infected people. It has an idea about “Test
more=find more=spread less.” It was ranked first in the country that had carried out the most
tests for COVID-19. More than 20,000 citizens were tested every day through both private and
public laboratories and drive- through the center in the early days of the pandemic. Six hun-
dred testing centers were opened to detect people with the least contact as possible. Undoubt-
edly, this explains why the number of newly diagnosed cases rose sharply and subsequently
declined significantly in such a short period.

Singapore is another country that was outstanding in decreasing numbers of cases. It claims to
be the first country that used antibodies to track Coronavirus infections. Researchers around
the world are racing to develop antibody tests, also called serological tests, that can confirm
whether someone was infected even after their immune system has cleared the virus that caus-
es COVID-19. Singapore uses a “TraceTogether” app, which uses Bluetooth to track nearby
phones (without location tracking), keeps local logs of those contacts, and only uploads them
to the Ministry of Health when the user chooses/consents, presumably after diagnosis so that
those contacts can be alerted.

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