Ghana and South Korea Emerge as 2 Countries That Got it Right
Exactly a year ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared that the COVID-19 public health emergency had become a pandemic, with increasing records of active cases and deaths.
114 countries were affected by the virus, and there was a record of 121,500 confirmed cases, with more than 4,000 COVID-19 related deaths.
One year on, COVID-19 cases have kept increasing, and a comparative study done by some researchers from Graphic Online has shown that Ghana and Korea have emerged as the 2 countries that got it right globally.
“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly,” said the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on that day in 2020. But in the year since that announcement, the fates of many countries have depended on how leaders have chosen their words.
The impact of the pandemic was unprecedented and all governments faced challenges dealing with a severe but highly unpredictable threat to the lives of their citizens. And some governments responded better than others.
According to the researchers, “We invited national experts to analyze their government’s communication style, the flow of information on coronavirus and the actions taken by civil society, mapping these responses onto the numbers of cases and deaths in the country in question. Our work reveals contrasting responses that reflect a nation’s internal politics, suggesting that a government’s handling of the pandemic was embedded in existing patterns of leadership.”
Domestic preventive measures were explained carefully by leaders of South Korea and Ghana to its citizens. The WHO proved ill-equipped, provided equivocal and flawed advice regarding international travel, even from Hubei province, and equivocated on the efficacy of wearing masks.
South Korea avoided a lockdown due to clearly communicating the threat of COVID-19 as early as January, then encouraged the wearing of masks, and quickly rolled out a contact-tracing app.
Each change in the official alert level, accompanied by new advice regarding social contact, was carefully communicated by Jung Eun-Kyung, the head of the country’s Centre for Disease Control, who also used changes in her own life to demonstrate how new guidance should work.
Akufo-Addo also took responsibility for coronavirus policy and explained carefully each measure required, being honest about the challenges the nation faced. These simple demonstrations of empathy earned him acclaim within his nation and around the world.
“We know how to bring the economy back to life. What we don’t know is how to bring people back to life,” he famously said.
