These countries stifled COVID-19: Now the delta variant has left them vulnerable

Not long ago, governments and officials in many Asia-Pacific countries saw their relative trickle of Covid-19 cases as a strength. Now it is looking like a vulnerability.

The Delta variant has backed many countries into a corner, short of vaccines and left with strategies that worked in the past but appear insufficient against this highly transmissible version of the virus.

South Korea admits social distancing isn’t enough. Australia wonders if lockdowns can still suffocate outbreaks. Singapore now views Covid-19 as endemic, like the seasonal flu.

Case rates in much of the region remain low, certainly compared with the U.S. and Europe, but much of the Asia-Pacific region is staring at a shortfall in immunity. Far fewer people fell sick than in the West, meaning less natural immunity, and less than 20% of the population in most Asian countries has been fully vaccinated, according to Oxford Economics.

That is less than half the vaccination rates in the U.S. and U.K., where uncontrolled early outbreaks prompted the authorities to bet aggressively on vaccines. It is also far short of the 60% to 70% threshold once viewed as the target to reach herd immunity—and even further from the higher percentage some public-health experts estimate would now be needed because of Delta’s transmissibility.

For a year and a half, citizens largely accepted a bargain with their governments: some impediments to daily life in exchange for a safer Covid-19 situation than in the likes of the U.S. and Europe. Outbreaks brought intermittent interventions. But the threat remained low, if not nonexistent, in places like Taiwan or New Zealand.

Delta’s increased potency has prompted a growing number of officials to confront their previous barometers of success and failure. Some wonder if their old playbooks still apply.

South Korea, with just 13% of its population fully vaccinated, responded to a Delta-fueled outbreak by tightening restrictions to their maximum levels for the first time. But cases spread nationally and spiraled to record levels.

“The standard social distancing measures of our strategy aren’t able to suppress the fast-spreading variants enough,” Son Young-rae, a senior health-ministry official, said Monday.

When Delta hit last month in Sydney, officials hoped the shelter-at-home restrictions that had suppressed previous Australian outbreaks would work again. But new daily cases are still setting records.

The country’s lockdown strategy is perhaps neither strong enough nor fast enough to deal with the Delta variant, said Omar Khorshid, president of the Australian Medical Association, at a recent press briefing. “It’s possible a new approach, particularly for Sydney but possibly for the rest of the country, will be required,” said Dr. Khorshid, who wants more priority placed on vaccinations.

The Delta threat is hampering countries’ plans to reopen borders and loosen restrictions—easing that could spur local spending. With vaccine rollouts still gaining scale, governments can’t yet implement separate sets of rules for those who have gotten their shots and those who haven’t.

With a few exceptions, acknowledgment is growing that the Delta variant’s contagiousness may make last year’s near-perfect marks impossible to replicate. Vietnam had reported no local Covid-19 cases for more than three months. Taiwan went 200 days without a locally transmitted case. Australia and New Zealand let citizens go mask-free for long stretches.

By global standards, the regional upticks are still small. As of July 26, the seven-day moving average of daily new cases was 1,383 in South Korea, 163 in Australia and just 48 in China, according to Our World in Data—nowhere near the U.S. figure of 57,301 or the U.K.’s 36,054.

But only a handful of Asian countries, including Singapore and South Korea, can reach 70% vaccination rates by the end of the year, according to a recent HSBC Global Research report, with the first half of 2022 a more realistic target for most everywhere else.

“Countries that succeeded in eliminating the virus will be reluctant to stop quarantine measures until vaccine coverage is high,” said Ben Cowling, head of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

Despite being largely free of Covid-19, China remains on guard against imported cases, including the Delta variant. Authorities this week reported more than 170 new cases in the eastern city of Nanjing, where they believe the Delta strain is circulating, and are now testing the city’s more than 9.3 million residents. Parts of the city have been sealed off with the aim of reducing gatherings.

More than 40% of China’s 1.4 billion people are fully vaccinated with homegrown vaccines.

Beijing plans to maintain its pandemic border restrictions until the second half of 2022, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The government wants to ensure that the Winter Olympics in Beijing next February and a once-a-decade power transition within the ruling Chinese Communist Party toward the end of the next year both proceed without hitches.

Cases in Singapore, where more than half of the population is fully vaccinated, began to climb in mid-July—just weeks after authorities announced plans to transition to treating the disease as endemic and ease restrictions on travel and social gatherings. The government responded by reimposing a ban on dining in at restaurants, limiting most gatherings to groups of two and suspending plans to allow quarantine-free travel for the vaccinated.

Officials may reconsider loosening by September, when around 80% of the city-state’s 5.7 million people are expected to be fully vaccinated.

“Sometimes, we may need to take a detour if we see hazards ahead,” Singapore’s minister for trade and industry, Gan Kim Yong, told lawmakers on Monday. “This way, we can ensure that we will get to our final destination safely, even though it may take a little longer.”

Delta has been detected in all but one of Southeast Asia’s 10 countries, causing deadly surges in Indonesia and elsewhere and forcing governments to reimpose or extend lockdowns, testing their populations’ patience with curbs on travel and commerce that have hobbled economies.

Countries that fared well early on, like Vietnam and Thailand, moved slowly to procure vaccine doses in part because transmission was under control.

The Thai government has faced particular scrutiny. The country of 66 million people avoided early outbreaks, but at a high cost to its economy. With borders closed, arrivals fell to 6.7 million last year from 39.9 million in 2019, official figures show—an especially hard blow given that tourism accounts for roughly 15% of gross domestic product, according to the World Bank.

The measures kept infections low for months, but cases rose rapidly this year. Only about 5.5% of Thailand’s population is fully vaccinated.

“Thailand did so well last year that it sat on its laurels and got behind the curve on vaccine procurement, ordering insufficient doses and failing to diversify its vaccine portfolio,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor at the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “It would not be surprising if all this leads to a political upheaval.” Live Mint