China Due to its
zero-COVID policy, China’s economy continued to squeeze. However, on 11 November 2022, the government eased the restrictions, while claiming to continue the war against the pandemic. The government reduced the quarantine restrictions from 10 days to eight, where travelers were required to spend five days instead of seven in a hotel quarantine and three at home. Besides, the airlines were also exempted from a penalty for bringing in COVID positive travelers.
India The Indian government airlifted 324 of its citizens from China on 31 January and 1 February via Air India special chartered flights. After Pakistan's refusal to evacuate its students from Wuhan, the Indian government offered to support them with evacuation along with citizens of other neighbouring countries. On 17 February, India announced a special
C-17 Globemaster flight carrying medical supplies to support China in Wuhan and evacuating citizens of India and neighbouring countries. India eventually evacuated 647 people including citizens of Maldives and Bangladesh. On 15 March, after a video conference of
SAARC leaders, PM
Narendra Modi allocated
₹74
crore (US$10 million) of funds classified as COVID-19 Emergency Fund for the SAARC countries. As a precautionary measure, India closed all of its international land borders on 16 March. On 22 March, India locked down places where cases had been confirmed—82 districts in 22 states and Union Territories—until 31 March, although essential services and commodities were to continue. 80 cities including major cities such as Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Nagpur, Varanasi and Raipur were also put under lockdown. On 24 March, the government announced a nationwide lockdown to be in effect for 21 days from 25 March until 14 April. This lockdown included
Indian Railways, the biggest employer in India; it was the first shutdown of the trains in 167 years.
Indonesia Many Indonesians criticised the government for a slow response and downplaying the pandemic. WHO, Australian government, and United States embassy in Indonesia have expressed their doubts about the Indonesian government's response to the pandemic. The governor of
West Sumatra province,
Irwan Prayitno faced backlash for accepting 174 tourists from China to the province. 174 Chinese tourists from
Kunming arrived at
Minangkabau International Airport at
Padang Pariaman Regency as
Citilink adds Padang – Kunming route. Prayitno received further backlash after welcoming the group of tourists himself at the airport and giving them a "grand welcome" with a cultural parade. The move angered local residents who demanded the governor return the group to China. Health experts are concerned that the country is failing to identify the transmission of the virus.
Marc Lipsitch, professor of
epidemiology at the
Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, "analysed air traffic out of the Chinese city at the centre of the outbreak in China and suggested in a report ... that Indonesia might have missed cases" of coronavirus. Western diplomats as well as local and international news outlets postulated that the lack of cases within Indonesia result from inadequate testing and under reporting, as opposed to sheer luck and
divine intervention. The government faced a backlash after instead pledging to set aside
IDR 72 billion ($5m) to pay for social media influencers to attract tourists to Indonesia. Indonesian president Joko Widodo has been criticised by the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, human rights groups, and by political parties including
Golkar and
Partai Keadilan Sejahtera for a lack of transparency regarding the information on COVID-19. Widodo has insisted not to share with the travel history details of patients tested positive with COVID-19 in an attempt to reduce panic and uneasiness in the general public.
Iran wagons against COVID-19 Iran reported its first confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections on 19 February 2020 in
Qom, where according to the
Ministry of Health and Medical Education, both had died later that day. Early measures announced by the government included the cancellation of concerts and other cultural events, sporting events, and Friday prayers, closure of universities, higher education institutions and schools, and allocated 5 trillion rials to combat the virus. President
Hassan Rouhani said on 26 February 2020 that there were no plans to quarantine areas affected by the outbreak, and only individuals would be quarantined. However,
Shia shrines in Qom remained open to pilgrims. Iran became a center of the spread of the virus after China. over ten countries have traced their cases back to Iran, indicating that the extent of the outbreak may be more severe than that admitted by the Iranian government. The
Iranian Parliament was shut down, with 23 of the 290 members of parliament reported to have had tested positive for the virus on 3 March. A number of senior government officials as well as two members of parliament have died from the disease.
Criticism against Iranian government's responses (left) at a press conference after which he tested positive for the virus. Iranians criticized government authorities for proceeding with
elections while the disease was spreading and closing secular spaces while keeping shrines open, especially in the Shia holy city of
Qom. Asif Shuja of the National University of Singapore's Middle East Institute suggested that "the fact that Iran reported deaths on the same day as its first infections right before its parliamentary elections 'can compel anyone' that there has been a cover-up". Scrutiny has also been targeted at the government's unwillingness to implement area-wide quarantine measures like those implemented by China and Italy, with Iranian officials calling quarantines "old-fashioned." There have been concerns that the Iranian government's official counts were an underestimate. The WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that "the WHO has its "own mechanism" for checking facts and has not seen problems with Iran's reported figures". The outbreak led to concern for the
2020 Summer Olympics which was scheduled to take place in Tokyo starting at the end of July. The Japanese government took extra precautions to help minimise the outbreak's impact. The government and the
International Olympic Committee negotiated a postponement of the Summer Olympics to 2021.
Criticism against Japanese government's responses Foreign Policy and
The Guardian reported that
relations between Japan and South Korea worsened, as South Korea criticized Japan's "ambiguous and passive quarantine efforts". On 5 March, Japan announced that it would strengthen quarantine for new entrants from China and South Korea and add some areas of Iran to the target area. The Chinese authorities showed their understanding of the decision, but the Japanese media and South Korean government criticized it. The Japanese media said that the decision was too late because they were too careful with China, and the Korean government turned it into a political issue. Japan's
Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has been criticized for a perceived delayed response. Critics have observed that while Japan announced the first case of infection on 28 January, it took until 17 February for the Health Ministry to inform the public on how to reach public screening centers and 25 February, for the government to issue a "basic policy" on outbreak response. The strict constraints on testing for the virus by Japanese health authorities have drawn accusations from critics such as Masahiro Kami, a
hematologist and director of the Medical Governance Research Institute but not an infectious disease expert, towards Abe of wanting to "downplay the number of infections or patients because of the upcoming Olympics." But the fact-checking in some media later reported to proved that it was fake news that 'the number of infected people was being reduced for the Olympics by the government.' Reports that only a small select number of public health facilities were authorized to test for the virus, after which the results could only be processed by five government-approved companies, has created a bottleneck where clinics have been forced to turn away even patients who had high fevers. This has led some experts to question Japan's official case numbers, with Tobias Harris, of
Teneo Intelligence in Washington, D.C. stating "You wonder, if they were testing nearly as much as South Korea is testing, what would the actual number be? How many cases are lurking and just aren't being caught?" As mentioned above, there were many articles criticizing the small number of PCR tests in Japan compared to South Korea, mainly in the Japanese and Korean media. However, the number of PCR tests in Japan at that time was actually not small at all. According to data released by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare the Japanese authorities conducted PCR tests of 10,205 as of 13 and 15 March 655 as of 17 March, except for those returning from China by charter flight and passengers on the cruise ship. The number of tests in Japan appears to be small compared to 320,000 in China, 250,000 in South Korea, 86,000 in Italy, and 77,000 in Russia. However, only 30,000 in the UK, 16,000 in Taiwan, and the United States had a higher number of tests than Japan except for that four countries. In terms of population ratio, the ranking was lower, but the number of tests in Japan was still at the average level. The quarantine measures on the cruise ship
Diamond Princess has also been criticised, even though there is no obligation under the international law to accept port calls for Japan and except for Japanese nationals on board, there is no obligation in Japan to treat all passengers, and the treatment is a good faith act, and the quarantine was the exercise of provisions in accordance with international and domestic laws. But Kentaro Iwata, an infectious disease professor at Kobe University Hospital, said that "the condition aboard was completely chaotic" and "violating all infection control principles". Dr. Yoshihiro Takayama, a member of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare who helped Iwata board the ship, said that Iwata had fight with DMAT members about his separate action and was forced to disembark in two hours, so he just looked around the lounge. A preliminary report by Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) estimated that most of the transmission on the ship had occurred before the quarantine, based on the first 184 cases. On 22 February, the Health Ministry admitted that 23 passengers were disembarked without being properly tested for the virus. On 23 February, a Japanese woman who tested negative before disembarking from the cruise ship later tested positive after returning to her home in
Tochigi Prefecture. She was not among the 23 passengers. Many passengers who were negative in the PCR test were tested positive after disembarking.
Philippines The first COVID-19 death outside China occurred in the Philippines on 1 February. On 9 March 2020, President
Rodrigo Duterte suspended classes in all levels in Metro Manila from 10 to 15 March. The class suspension in Metro Manila was extended to 12 April, following the decision of concerned authorities to raise the COVID-19 alert level in the country to Code Red Sublevel 2. Work in the executive branch of the government was also suspended for the same period as part of the Stringent Social Distancing Measures in the National Capital Region (NCR), with the directive for the concerned government agencies to form skeletal forces to ensure the delivery of basic services. Congress and the Judiciary were encouraged to do the same. Agencies providing law enforcement services, health services, and emergency services were enjoined to continue to operate at full capacity. Other salient directives, contained in a resolution adopted by the
Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) and announced by the Philippine President on 12 March, at the Heroes Hall in
Malacañang Palace, included, the prohibition of mass gatherings that could strain the resources of the host community, imposition of community quarantine over
Metro Manila, and encouragement of flexible work arrangements for the private sector among others. A memorandum containing the guidelines for stringent social distancing measures and the management of COVID-19 in the National Capital Region was issued by Executive Secretary
Salvador Medialdea by order of the president on 13 March. Among the directives embodied in the memorandum were suspension of classes and all school activities until 14 April, prohibition of mass gatherings, imposition of strict social distancing during essential meetings and religious activities, and provisions for alternative and/or flexible work arrangements. On 16 March, the president signed Proclamation No. 929 declaring a state of calamity throughout the country for a period of six months, bringing into effect the price control of basic needs and commodities, granting of interest-free loans, distribution of calamity funds and hazard allowance for public health workers and government personnel in the fields of science and technology. President Duterte also placed the island of
Luzon (including its associated islands) under
enhanced community quarantine on 16 March that further restricted the movement of people through the suspension of mass public transport and the closure of non-essential establishments. Business Process Outsourcing and export-oriented businesses were allowed to continue operation subject to certain conditions. Relevant government agencies were ordered to provide social amelioration measures. Following the sharp increase of confirmed cases, President Duterte called Congress to a special session to "authorize the President to exercise powers necessary to carry out urgent measures to meet the current national emergency related to the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)."
South Korea The first confirmed case of COVID-19 was identified with a 35-year-old Chinese woman on 20 January. The first South Korean national to be infected occurred three days later was a 55-year-old man who worked in Wuhan and returned for a checkup with flu symptoms. The two infection reports were publicly released on 24 January. The sixth patient was the first case in South Korea who had never visited Wuhan. The 56-year-old man caught the virus when visiting a restaurant with the third patient. A woman, who had returned from
Thailand after a five-day vacation, was tested positive and confirmed as the sixteenth case on 4 February. Three more cases were confirmed on 5 February, bringing the total case count to 19. The seventeenth and nineteenth patients had attended a conference in Singapore and been in contact with an infected person there. The very same day the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Korea (KCDC) announced that the second patient had been released from hospital after being tested negative in consecutive tests, becoming the country's first COVID-19 patient to fully recover. On 19 February, the number of confirmed cases increased by 20. On 20 February 70 new cases were confirmed, giving a total of 104 confirmed cases, according to the KCDC. According to
Reuters, KCDC attributed the sudden jump to 70 cases linked to "Patient No. 31", who had participated in a gathering in
Daegu at the
Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony. in a mental ward of Cheongdo Daenam Hospital in
Cheongdo County. According to the mayor of Daegu, the number of suspected cases as of 21 February was 544 among 4,400 examined followers of the church. The hospital was suspected as the source of the present outbreak after it was visited by a woman who became the second fatal case of Korea on that day. The infection spread outside via a funeral ceremony attended by members of the church. All South Korean military bases were on lockdown after tests confirmed that three soldiers were indeed positive for the virus.
United States Forces Korea raised the alert level from low to moderate and cut off non-essential travel to and from USFK Daegu. USFK Daegu's school facilities were closed and non-essential personnel were ordered to stay at home while any visitors going there were not allowed to enter.
Camp Humphreys enacted virus detection protocols, including temperature checks and raised the alert level to high. On 26 February, an American soldier based at Camp Carroll was diagnosed to be positive and was quarantined away from bases via off-base housing unit with
contact tracing done that showed his movements to Camp Walker. in South Korea on 6 March As of 22 February, among 9,336 followers of the church, 1,261 reported symptoms. At the time, 169 confirmed cases involved the church and another 111 came from the Cheongdo Daenam Hospital. 23 February saw another 123 cases with 75 being from Shincheonji and 24 February saw 161 additional cases with 129 being from the religious group. Over 27,000 people have been tested for the virus with 19,127 negative results. On 24 February 15 countries imposed travel restrictions to and from South Korea. It was also reported that a senior health official overseeing the COVID-19 efforts in Daegu tested positive and was also a member of Shincheonji. Within a few days, a petition to the nation's president urging for the disbandment of the church had over 750,000 signatures. Their headquarters in
Gwacheon was raided by law enforcement; government officials said all 245,000 members of the religious group would be found and tested. rising to 3,150 on 29 February. On 8 March,
KCDC in South Korea announced that 79.4% of confirmed COVID-19 cases were related to group infection. KCDC also announced that outbreak associated with
Shincheonji Church totaled 4,482 infections, accounting for 62.8% of the total confirmed cases. 13 March was the first time since the outbreak on 20 January in which the number of recoveries, 177, was larger than the number of those who newly tested positive, 110. As infection rates have risen outside Korea leading to increases of sick arriving in the country (476 of 9,661 cases were imported as of 30 March), the KCDC implemented stronger infectious disease control measures for travelers coming from overseas as of 1 April. By 9 April 2020, South Korea had about 10,423 cases and 204 deaths, with over 494,711 people having been tested, a
case fatality rate of 1.95%, which is lower than the WHO's global case fatality rate of 4.34%. Seeing the
infodemic on COVID-19 information starting in China and spreading to Korea and the US, fake news researcher
Cha Meeyoung of
KAIST and the
Institute for Basic Science, along with researchers from
Ewha Womans University, started the multilingual Facts Before Rumors campaign to separate common claims seen online. By 17 April, the KCDC stated that it knew of 163 patients who were said to have recovered, but again tested positive. The exact cause was not known but they stated several possibilities. After several days with new infections numbering in the single digits (18, 20, 22 April), the government announced it was going to start lifting restrictions starting with stores, restaurants, gyms,
cram schools, bars, and religious services; which is notable as most of the nation's infections came from places of worship. In coming weeks, arboretums, forests and national parks will begin to open with social distancing still in place until at least early May. After seeing Korea successfully lower cases of infection, President
Moon Jae-in has engaged in "coronavirus diplomacy" with leaders of other nations, part of which involved exporting test kits to more than 20 countries. On 26 April, confirmed patient number 31 in Daegu was discharged after 67 days.
Criticism against South Korean government's responses The
Ministry of Health and Welfare had been criticized for unilaterally implementing
telephone consultation and prescription without discussing with the
Korea Medical Association, and for not restricting traffic from China despite several warnings from the association and a petition proposed by the society. On 22 February, the South Korean government apologized for calling the virus "
Daegu Corona 19" in an official report. The term had been widespread on social media and raised concerns about discrimination. More than 1.5 million South Koreans signed a
petition to
impeach President
Moon Jae-in over what they claimed was the government's mishandling of the outbreak. On 6 March, the South Korean government only had entry restricted to Japanese citizens out of 102 countries that blocked Korea. The action had been widespread on social media and raised concerns about
anti-Japanese discrimination.
Turkey On 10 January 2020, ignoring
China's insistence on the lack of evidence for human-to-human transmission,
Ministry of Health experts stated that they suspected that
SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted among people, and accordingly set up the
Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board. 26 experts in
infectious diseases and
clinical microbiology originally comprised the Coronavirus Advisory Board, which was subsequently enlarged to include five additional experts in
intensive care medicine,
internal medicine, and
virology. In the early hours of 11 March 2020 (
UTC+03:00), the
Minister of Health Fahrettin Koca announced that a Turkish man who had contracted the virus while travelling in Europe was the country's first confirmed COVID-19 case. The patient had been placed in isolation at an undisclosed hospital, and family members of the patient were put under observation. in
Turkey would close starting on 16 March 2020. Given the intense learning needs of students with disabilities, the Ministry of National Education announced that elementary-, middle- and high-school students with special needs will continue to have in-person attendance in fixed small groups, with adults rotating into the class, so as to facilitate
contact tracing. The Ministry of National Education subsequently announced that teachers and staff in schools for students with special needs are able to opt out of in-person teaching if they or their families have a health risk. with the rest of the teachers matched to students to provide individual assessment, coaching, and tutoring from 23 March to 31 May 2020. After the
Ministry of National Education announced the closure of all schools or who live in non-supportive home environments are likely to suffer On 21 March, the
Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure a total
curfew for those who are over the age 65 or chronically ill. On 27 March, the
Ministry of the Interior issued a new statement regarding gatherings during weekends, announcing that starting from 28 to 29 March, having picnics, fishing at the shores, doing physical exercise outside (including running and walking on the weekends in city and town centers) would be banned until the virus spread has been contained. It was also stated that, should they deem it necessary, local authorities may extend these new measures to weekdays. Also on 27 March, President Erdoğan announced that all overseas flights were terminated, adding that intercity travel was subject to permission by the state governors, and that places such as picnic areas, forests and historical sites would be closed on the weekend. On 3 April 2020, President Erdoğan announced a 15-day entry ban to 30
metropolitan municipalities as well as
Zonguldak. Also, the curfew was extended to people younger than 20 years old. Using masks in public places became mandatory.
Criticism against Turkish government's responses The announced 100 billion economic measures package, set to be provided by the government, was criticized by institutions and individuals, including economists and politicians. The lack of a detailed action plan was the center of criticism. Additionally, at a time when people were encouraged to stay at home, the government was criticized for allowing airline passenger transport and tax reductions that support tourism. Critics asked for lowering the down payment of housing loans and emphasized on the need to provide employment support to different sectors. The donation campaign initiated by President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was supported by representatives of the ruling party, members of the oppositions had a less favorable reaction to it. After the government's decision to take money from the income of several institutions in order to make donations to this campaign, the
Confederation of Public Employees' Unions filed a criminal complaint as a result of the salary cuts of the staff of many institutions such as MEB, BOTAŞ, General Directorate of Forestry,
Ministry of Justice,
Constitutional Court and Social Service Provincial Directorates. Additionally, a similar donation campaign initiated by the metropolitan municipalities with
CHP administration was terminated by the
Ministry of the Interior and their bank accounts were blocked. Regarding this decision, the Ankara Bar Association issued a statement, saying: "Although the aforementioned circular and blocking process enforced by the Ministry of the Interior are clearly unlawful, the provision of social services belongs neither exclusively to the local governments nor to the central government."
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