COVID-19 in ASEAN countries: A comparison

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the organisation that links ten countries in South East Asia with a combined population just shy of two thirds billion and a combined GDP of over three billion US Dollars. The style of government, GDP per capita, and cultures vary significantly but they have some common threats: Geopolitical stability as China has been increasing exercising influence over the region, shifting demographics as the region has a significant number of youths and changing social norms.

The main common threat for all countries in 2020 has been the COVID-19 pandemic. ASEAN countries have been at the forefront of this battle with the first reported case outside China being in Thailand and the first death outside China in the Philippines. As Europe and the Western world is grappling with the pandemic, using different techniques ranging from Sweden's nonchalance to total lock-downs, it would be of interest to see how ASEAN countries are managing the pandemic and whether any patterns can be noticed.

I asked students in the business faculty at The University of Malta for help in collecting data on the decisions taken by different countries in the region as well as some friends for help to collect the data. Initially, the plan was to model the Maltese development of COVID-19 cases by using ASEAN countries as a projection in line with past articles (for example this article projecting Maltese cases similar to China, Spain, Italy and Singapore). However, we found the variation in results to be very high between this country. This article summarizes our findings and sits in a series of articles discussing each country individually. The links for the different articles can be found here: Brunei & Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR & Myanmar, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

ASEAN Countries Performance

The results within ASEAN countries have ranged significantly but compared to the rest of the world, the death rates per million of population has remained relatively low. The worse ASEAN performer, the Philippines, does not even rank within the seventy five countries with the highest death toll per population ratio worldwide. As ASEAN countries were first exposed to the pandemic, one would have expected their statistics to be worse as they can be deemed to be a couple of weeks ahead. However one needs to consider that the proportion of the elderly population, aptly named the old-dependency ratio, is much lower in ASEAN countries. All countries except for Singapore and Thailand have an old-dependency ratio of less than 10%.

Poorer countries leading the pack?

One would also expect the poorer countries to be doing worse off but the table above clearly shows it is not the case - indeed the correlation between GDP per capita and cases has been above 0.95 where 1 means perfect correlation - Richer countries have more cases. I have two possible explanations for this. Firstly more developed countries would be less likely to close off borders and shock the economy. On the other hand, Lao PDR closed off all ports and airports before the first reported COVID-19 case. Secondly, richer countries are bound to have cities with higher densities, people living longer (i.e. more elderly that are mostly at risk) and more money to hold more swabs/tests. The latter point is apparent in the fact that the death rates per million population has a much lower rate and there is no evidence of a correlation with GDP per capita.

Best Performers

The results in Lao PDR and Myanmar are commendable. For example Myanmar declared on 30th March that it would not accept any returning citizens from border areas (especially as the country cannot afford to issue especially designated areas like the richer pack). However, Vietnam seems to be the stand-out leader from the pack. The unique decisions taken here include mandatory mask wearing from late March, individual online health reports, proactive use of technology to inform public about infected areas/individuals and aggressive local lock-downs of infected areas (read more here).

Conclusion

One might ask which ASEAN countries have reached their peak and the graphs above would indicate that most, except for Indonesia and Singapore, have reached the peak. However in a previous article, I had explained that discussing peaks is not ideal without looking at the individual characteristics of each country. For example, Malaysia's numbers increased significantly due to a super-spreader a religious ceremony (Tabligh) that eventually led to over a 1700 confirmed cases by end of March. This single event caused at about a third of cases in Malaysia.

I learned that there definitely isn't a rule-book on how to tackle this pandemic, although the effect of some measures, such as closing schools, have been investigated and will follow through in the next and final article (now available here).