Count the votes and look to the democracies of Northeast Asia for victory against COVID19

I went to bed around 1 am last night, at which point it had been clear for a few hours that we would not have a result on election night. Biden already has a commanding popular vote lead but key battleground states are still counting votes and some places, such as Nevada, are already announcing we have to wait until Thursday for results. So be it, thankfully we seem to have avoided some of the worst fears of election day disruptions and while other developed democracies have made investments to count quickly, our forebearers had to wait much longer and accuracy matters more than speed. Trump’s attempt to disregard votes postmarked or otherwise cast by election day and his lies about our system is a disgraceful, but not surprising attempt, to steal the election. Delivering an accurate count of how citizens voted is a foundational requirement for a democracy and I have no intention of accepting systematic attempts to undermine the legitimacy of my nation’s vote.

Abiding by my own maxim for patience, I’ll largely avoid further commentary here with one critical exception. I find quite alienating the extent to which many my fellow American have accept that the U.S. has led the world in Covid19 related deaths and had a consistently high death rate, both of which a competent administration could have avoided (the extent of deaths that could have been straightforwardly avoided is debatable, I have seen estimates from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands). Many of those people were in vulnerable populations and may have been killed by complications rather direct symptoms of the virus, but reporting on excess deaths clearly shows how many more are dying that were a pandemic not raging out of control would be alive. Many countermeasures are painful and costly and it is no surprise that they prove controversial, but Mr. Trump’s failure to fund testing programs and send a clear signal on masks and other lower cost safety measures  has meant unnecessary sacrifice of the lives of the people in this country and an acceptance of defeat that I would have thought would have been anathema to my fellow citizens.

In the bigger picture, the relapse in parts of western Europe do show that merely competent is not enough. I have seen columnist I respect give in to grim conclusions as to our options but aspiring to be Germany and not France is not our only alternative.  The Republic of Korea, Japan, and Taiwan have all shown that better results are possible in democratic nations closer to the outbreak. I am most familiar with the response in South Korea, having recently supported a binational conference that looked at the strategic implications of scientific innovation. How have they gotten things so right? Because they’ve been through prior pandemics, including working with us with us to prepare for future one, and they put that learning into practice:

“South Koreans don’t comply with invasive contact tracing because they are Asian, they comply with it because they have been through pandemics before and they understand the severity of the danger,” said Jenny Town, a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan policy research organization.

I am no public health expert, but a similar dynamic holds in an area near and dear to my heart, mass transit construction costs. South Korea tunneling sets a global standard, and having had the chance to personally ride lines in Seoul and Busan, I’ve been impressed by both the quality and the the extent of coverage.  My fellow Americans, we have a choice between continuing to think we’re the best in many areas or in actually looking around the world and seeing cases where others do better and learn from them. I am deeply ashamed by the deaths we have accepted of our neighbors. The problems we face are hard, contexts vary, and no one country or political agenda is going to get it all right. We need to experiment and learn from others experiments. But we should be angrier about the ineptitude of our pandemic response and we should channel that anger not into cynicism but to innovation and saving lives.